Ahoy, bunch.

My searching has been fruitless; perhaps someone here knows a trick.

I own the DRM-free version 1.03 from fireflower. I use a mouse and keyboard (I don't have a 360 controller). When I meet a trainer, I can select a flashing skill. The flashing indicates that I am able to learn it. The game then prompts me with a confirmation dialog (see attached). The choices in the dialog don't respond to the mouse. At all. Not mouseovers, not clicks. I haven't found a key on the keyboard that corresponds to the choices. Other interface elements do respond to the mouse, for example the tabs at the top of the book, and the white-on-red X in the upper right hand corner. It's just that dialog which is dead. This has been true for both trainers I have tried. Reloading and restarting don't change the situation.

So I can't train anything. The only skills I have are those that are automatically granted. I don't think it will be long before I meet an impasse.

Any clues or suggestions?

You see the Playstation controller icons? Or is that just an example you found online? I only ask because on the PC it's supposed to be a white-on-red check mark and a white-on-red X identical to the one in the upper right-hand corner, and that might have something to do with your problem.

I know you said you don't have a 360 controller, but do you have any controller connected to your computer? Can't recall ever having a problem with my DirectInput controller while playing, but you never know. Barring that possibility, it might be worth looking through the config files to see if there's something about a controller setup that's activated.

I was just returning to comment something similar myself, 227. I looked at other interface elements and yes, I'm seeing the controller icons when I should be seeing mouse icons. (That is my own screenshot.) So I'm imagining now that I perhaps have a bad build and somehow it's offering the wrong dialog (controller rather than mouse) for training confirmations. I skimmed the ini files earlier looking for potential problems without finding anything.

I'll certainly look again. Maybe I can find a keyboard-pretends-to-be-360-controller type app and train that way. If it's annoying, though, I guess I'll just give the game a pass.

Thanks for responding. I'll holler if I have any success.

edit:
Now that I think about it, I have seen scrambled interface elements at one other point in the game. Dammit, can't remember where. But the buttons were not drawing properly. It was controller-style icons but with mismatched and misaligned mouse-style flags sliding out when I moused over. Maybe the game is a wash.

If you look in the folder where your saves are, there should be a file called settings-user.ini, and inside there there'll be a part that says "the name of the control scheme to use." Mine says "control_scheme = 0xD32E9132" and it might be worth checking to see if yours says something different and replacing it to see if it fixes things.

Funny...don't remember having such problems on the 1.02 version of the game. But again, i was using two community mods (performance mod 2.1 and autofixer 2.4). First mod was because of the horrendous performance that the game had on multicore PC's (trouble with the mod being that all the processes in the PC were relegated to single core until the next restart) and the second was for various game bugs that appeared along the playthrough.

You can try the autofixer. As for the performance mod, i recommend it only if you are willing to restart your PC after your gaming session, allowing the processes to come back to their normal state.

Mine says:
control_scheme = mouse_n_keyboard

I changed it to your own setting, Nothing choked, but it didn't fix the problem, either.

Hmm. I'm looking into this now, thank you.

Took a look on the Steam forums and there are a lot of bug reports (genuine, not invented), bugs that weren't in the 1.02 vanilla (the patch was mislabeled as 1.2, but is actually 1.02).

What i found odd is the fact that, from what i see, the game got worse in 1.03 than it was in terms of bugs and performance with 1.02. Someone s...ed the pooch...

The autofixer installs though I had to find supply the Venetica directory myself.

The fireflower version doesn't actually install, I just unzip a rar and run venetica.exe within the bin folder. So the whole thing is sitting in my downloads folder, where I unzipped it. (Thinking at the time I would then install from there.) I wonder if it's an unlucky permissions issue stemming from its location. I'm using Vista.

I'll ask fireflower and see what they have to say. Perhaps not many people own this version:

1.03 GER (Aug 5 2010) UNPROTECTED

Though it says GER, my language is set to English. Ahh, dammit. Well, I googled quite a bit for this issue, and the internet was strangely quiet. I'll dig some more. Thanks.

1.03 patch was released only for the german version of the game. The retail english was 1.0 with a stable 1.02 patch added later (and only 2 major bugs left, bugs that had some workarounds or could be fixed with the autofixer). Also, the both mods were released by the german community.

If the dtp entertainment forums would still be around, we could have checked the german section if there were problems with 1.03. Unfortunately the site disappeared when the original publisher went down:(

I've asked fireflower about it. After that, I'll try Deck13. It looks like one dev there responds to Venetica questions on the Steam forums. Thanks again for the info!

I wish you luck. And about the dude "answering" the questions (more like masterfully avoiding the proverbial elephant in the room...), i seriously doubt that he's anything but a glorified community manager (Deck 13 do not have their own forums, they always the publisher's forums, in this case - Steam). And i seriously doubt that after 6 year there are still many or even any of the original devs.

Venetica had a really troubled launch. In Europe, the publisher was dtp entertainment, a publisher that lacked the actual power to handle a big launch and one of the reasons that the Drakensang series and Venetica sold poorly back in the day. Many months after the game's launch, you could not find a trace of this game ever being sold i the retail shops (dtp never went with it on Steam for more exposure). I've got a copy through a friend of mine that knew that i wanted the game, and he found a copy in a rather obscure shop in Hague. The initial launch was like Germany, BeNeLux (Belgium/Holland/Luxembourg), France and Italy. All countries received a rather small amount of physical copies compared with the interest that the game gathered back then. Note: the version of the game sold in the BeNeLux had english as one of the included languages, so the lucky people like me got that version.

Flash-forward a year later (2010, now), the game finally launches in UK. Most people already gave up on it, due to no possibility to acquire it.

In 2011, ATARI gets the rights for releasing Venetica in US. No one did any shred of advertising for the game, so you can imagine the interest and the amount the sales.

Somehow Deck 13 recovered, but there was "restructuring" (we know what that means). Blood Knights, developed for Kalypso Media, brought some cash that saved them and co-developing Lords of the Fallen allowed them to stay alive.

At same time, Radon Labs (known for their Drakensang games) wasn't lucky to survive. Same publishing disaster like in the Venetica's case. Same dtp entertainment as a publisher. And the company went bankrupt losing their IPs and rights of developing any new Dark Eye titles.

Germany (particularly) and Europe(generally) have a ton of talented devs. What they seem to lack it's a proper management.

Sorry for the long post. It's just a bit of game's history.

No need to be. It was super helpful. My expectations are now... realistic!

Happily, Grargar intends to buy the FireFlower version and will be able to tell me whether it is bugged for everyone or just for me.

I bought it from FireFlower as well but I haven't tried learning a skill yet. I'll let you know how it goes.

Aces, thanks a lot!