Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg (
More info?)
"Guillaume JAY" <gjay_diespammer-die@free.fr> wrote in message
news:g40p21tq0oqcuhej6rvqehglh5ma9hdie8@4ax.com...
> On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 05:17:08 -0600, "Ken from Chicago"
> <kwicker1b_nospam@comcast.net> wrote:
>>It's a notebook. How do you find out what video card is used?
>
> You must have an intel chipset-graphics card, which is not compatible
> with DirectX 9, especially some kind of text display. Brad Wardell
> spoke about it and Political machine, let's me search..
> here, in the gamasutra postmortem, in what went wrong :
> "When we decided to use DirectX 9, we assumed that was fine. We had no
> idea that the game would have compatibility problems with some
> hardware configurations. Our view was that, as long as we followed the
> rules, we would be fine. We were wrong. Firstly, the main reason we
> used DirectX 9 was to get access to easy TrueType font support. But it
> turns out that the older integrated Intel video cards don't support
> that. So essentially, we have a game that doesn't work on those
> machines. There's no "workaround" for it, other than us scrapping
> TrueType fonts and going back to encoding fonts again, which we don't
> have the budget for (especially since this only affects one type of
> video card).
>
> But on a game that targets "casual gamers", you have a high number (in
> absolute terms) of people who have these low-end video cards, and who
> don't understand why a game that seems to have relatively mild
> requirements wouldn't work on their system. This results in very mad
> users. Unfortunately, mad users don't just return games, some of them
> go to review sites and take out their anger there. It only takes one
> angry guy giving a game a rating of 1 out of 10 on a game reviews
> website to really mess up the overall rating. Even though this is
> technically Intel's fault, the user doesn't care. If I had to do it
> over again, I would probably have required us to put in some sort of
> "fallback" mode with basic font support, so that the game would work
> on those Intel machines to a certain degree. Alternatively, we could
> have pushed Intel to fix their drivers before the game's release (the
> newer integrated Intel chipsets--or at least, those that are less than
> 2 years old - work fine).
> "
>
> That could be your problem, TrueType support in DirectX9 on
> integrated intel chipsets.
>
> Guillaume
Thanks. Once I knew the problem I upgraded the graphics driver from Intel,
rebooted the the menu text was restored. Thanks again!
-- Ken from Chicago
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