That's just it. It is solved to the OP's satisfaction. Best to create a new thread with your unresolved question.

This.

The reply marked "solved" does *not* solve the OPs question, as you'd notice if you would read the post.

"When launching my game, the intro cinematic plays correctly, and the menu appears afterwards. When it loads, the text on each menu option is just... gone. It isn't there. When loading the game up through blind clicking, the ingame text is completely indecipherable, due to each pixel either being black, white, or a shade of brown.

I cannot play this game at all in this current state, as I have no way to read any of the text presented by the game. I am really hoping this issue has been long soled, because I could not find it on the first two pages of the forum. "

In no way does the post marked "solved" actually solve that issue. Thanks for the unhelpful reply. Or not. Either way.

This very issue is marked as solved on the support page. So that's why it is frickin' annoying that it isn't solved in the actual thread. Get it?


Furthermore the tech support submission page doesn't actually work at the moment. Thought I'd ask the community. I hope you're not a good representative of it.

I think you need to learn how the community forum works here.

Firstly, the fact that this thread is marked solved is because the OP decided to mark a response as the solution. GOG do not mark the threads as solved, the person who asked the question does.

Yes they did mark a post as solved and then went on to say that it didn't fix the text issue. But reading further you can see that they then got in touch with GOG support and that the problem was identified as a conflict with some third party software. As we don't have the details of this solution I have advised you to do as the OP did and to contact GOG support. They might even have the old records of how they solved PrayForSnow's problem with the missing text.

All that Gydion did was to re-iterate this point, emphasising that you should contact GOG support as I suggested. Certainly no reason to go calling him unhelpful.

As for the technical support submission page not working, I've sent in two requests to GOG in the last week. Both were as the Other option and Question as type. So it is certainly possible to get in contact with them.

Spiteful and snarky as always. How have you been, atlantico?

Oh I do find it so amusing when someone wanting help acts in such an unreasonable way. Makes you wonder how much they really want that help when they spend so much effort attacking others instead of using that effort in a more constructive way, such as following the advice given (creating a new thread as Gydion said, and contacting GOG support as the OP did and as I have said to do more than once).

So, if you know how the community works, why bother raising your question in this way? Why not go straight for the new thread? Why complain about the OP having marked this as solved when there's nothing that can be done about that? Oh, and the OP got a solution from GOG support, so they did get a solution in the end anyway.

My advice was (and still is) to contact GOG support. Is that not worth a damn? GOG support have helped many, including the OP in this case. How can you judge the value of that advice when you haven't contacted them?

As for the GOG support form, I sent one early last week and another one in YESTERDAY, so it definitely is possible to contact them. If the Tech Support form itself doesn't work for you, then use one of the other forms. I went for the Other form and sent a question in. A support ticket was raised and passed on to the relevant GOG staff to deal with. Why can't you do that?

Oh, and it is spelt "yesterday", with an r. Are you dyslexic maybe? It's nothing to be ashamed of.

So why don't you create a new thread as Gydion suggested?
Anyway, I thought you wanted help getting the game running, so why keep harping on about this thread being marked solved?


Now, for the last time (as my effort is clearly better spent elsewhere), go and contact GOG support.

Such self righteous indignation. Wow.

So the question is yet again: can you read or are you using dictation software to post? Because you clearly did not read or comprehend at least that when I posted first and to the moment I posted last, there was *no* way to contact tech support.

Do you know how much I care that you could in some moment in time contact tech support? And you know what, it still doesn't work for me. So if you were actually trying to be helpful, you'd do something other than to espouse rather impotently that "it works on my end".

Why don't I create a new thread? At first it didn't seem logical, this thread existed, had some posts and ideas in it and was *not* solved. That it was marked solved was in fact a further incentive to post in it, if only to highlight that this thread is marked in error as solved - unless you can point out where this issue is solved.

Now let me teach you about this community, since you clearly don't understand it: this is a collection of our knowledge as users. It is as useful and helpful as the posts in it. It's useless if it is populated by faulty answers, arrogant self righteous people insisting that their posts must be helpful because they contain text and if threads are erroneously marked as containing the solution to a specific issue, when they do not.

The solution is not to contact tech support. That's just something I have to do because I had the misfortune to being inflicted with your "assistance" and because no one here seems to know anything about this issue or how to solve it.

The most unhelpful and insipid threads found in these forums are thread where some random guy has a problem, that he finds a solution for, posts that he found a solution but nothing else. Not what it was or how he came about actually solving it.

I've seen more than one such thread, although this is the first one I've seen actually marked by such a douchebag OP as "solved".

I'm a quite pleased though that you won't be continuing to inflict your "assistance" upon me. Thank you for that.

Fine thanks, how are you?

Now. To finally end this thread or at least make it live up to its title as being "solved" because I found what was causing the issue.

After restarting in Clean Boot Mode the game worked fine. No problems with the text in-game. Menus worked 100%, text all 100%.

After guessing it was the MacType font smoothing extension, since this was a font problem in game, I disabled it for Alpha Centauri and that fixed it.

So things that affect font rendering may conflict with the game.

Issue: Blank menus/unreadable text SOLVED

(at last)

+rep, thank you ! I am using MacType too, and without your post I think I would not have found so fast that it was the cause of the problem (I use it in registry mode, and almost forget that it's running)