sirkillalot

I don't know if it's been posted about in this thread before, but I ran into an issue the other day trying to run KSP on a computer lab machine at my university, on which I don't have root access. In particular, I was missing the Arial fonts. The information on that problem at the beginning of this thread seems to imply that KSP uses fontconfig to find installed fonts, so I installed them to ~/.fonts and ran fc-cache -fv, which found and cached them. However, this is not actually the case - running under strace reveals that in fact KSP only searches recursively under /usr/share/fonts regardless of fontconfig settings. This means that users like me, on public machines without root access, cannot install the fonts anywhere KSP will find them. I did come up with a workaround that let me use the fonts, but I would hesitate to recommend it to others as it involves patching the KSP binary. Please back up your install before you try this, and only proceed if you actually understand what all of the words in the following procedure mean and what you're doing at each step. To do it, first make a font directory somewhere you can write to, and put in it the Arial fonts and a symlink back to /usr/share/fonts. The full path to this directory must be shorter in length than "/usr/share/fonts" - I used "/tmp/fontslol". It's likely possible to use relative paths from the location of the KSP binary but I haven't tried it - if you get it working please let me know! Next, use the command "strings -t x KSP.x86(_64) | grep fonts" to find the offset in the binary of the directory name where it searches for fonts - I found that in the 64 bit 0.23.5 binary it's at offset 0xF1F168. Now, open the binary in your favorite hex editor and navigate to that offset. Write over the "/usr/share/fonts" string with the name of your directory. Be sure to terminate the string with a null byte if it's shorter than the original string. The patched binary will now search recursively under your new directory for fonts, finding the Arial fonts and searching through the symlink for whatever else it needs. This is an ugly hack, but I thought I'd post it here in case others are in the same situation - I'm not sure if the font-loading code comes from KSP or Unity, but it'd be nice if whichever team is responsible could address this issue in future versions.