A.Stahl on 14/8/2020 at 14:12
I have a localized (rus) version of Thief 2 and there is a problem with font in original missions. I can read books, but scrolls are unreadable. I suppose that is just a font problem: localizations always have these kind of problems. I would like to use in scrolls the same font used in the books. How can I achieve that?
A.Stahl on 14/8/2020 at 14:28
An easy way to translate all those texts to English will suffice too...
Psych0sis on 14/8/2020 at 15:37
Play the English release for that then
A.Stahl on 14/8/2020 at 15:47
Quote Posted by Psych0sis
Play the English release for that then
Obviously I want to avoid reinstalling the program. Maybe I can just replace some files or something like that.
baeuchlein on 15/8/2020 at 02:42
Yes, it should be possible to just copy the relevant font files to the folders into which they should go - but it might be difficult to find out where these folders are.
How did you obtain your Russian version of Thief 2? Did you, perhaps, use the patch provided by Darkfate.org?
howeird on 15/8/2020 at 03:16
I had a problem with blank books in the DarkMod game. I was running DarkMod in Linux and thought it could have been that they used Microsoft fonts in the fm which Linux couldn't read. I never did figure it out. If your running Windows it could be a update that screwed up the Russian fonts. It's just a theory or idea that i had that you could look into.
A.Stahl on 15/8/2020 at 04:12
No, I'm running Thief on Linux through Wine. Anyway, most of the games use their own fonts and I'm almost sure that Thief is doing the same.
baeuchlein on 15/8/2020 at 14:31
Thief 1 and Thief 2 indeed use their own fonts for displaying game content. But the original fonts did not have cyrillic letters, so any FMs in Russian as well as translations of the original games need modified fonts to be of any use.
There are at least two sources for such fonts on Darkfate.org. One source is the "russification" patch (that's how Google translates it) I mentioned. After applying it to an English version of Thief 2 NewDark v1.27 yesterday, I got a Russian version which seems to be completely translated, and also has all necessary fonts included. However, it uses a rather complicated-looking setup, installing its Russian contents in various folders, and apparently "behaves" like a Thief 2 mod. I think it would have been easier if the Russian contents were just installed in folders called "Russian" instead of "English" (and, in fact, alongside English), but for some reason, the developers of this patch decided otherwise. If A. Stahl uses this patch to play "Thief 2", then the fonts should be in _RussianPack/COMMON/RUSSIAN/books/parch, _RussianPack/COMMON/RUSSIAN/books/parch2 and _RussianPack/COMMON/RUSSIAN/books/parch3 (all of these paths are from the Thief 2 main folder). The name of the font files in this case is textfont.fon.
If these folders do not exist, then another kind of Russian version of Thief 2 is used, and we must find out how that version handles font files. If the folders exist, but do not contain a textfont.fon file, then we could place one there... but it would be good to know why these files are missing, since other necessary files could be missing as well, then.
If the folders do exist and also contain textfont.fon files, then there is something else amiss. Maybe the "language" line in Darkinst.cfg is not right anymore (it should contain the word "russian", among others, and preferrably before "english"), or maybe the mod configuration is not right anymore. It's usually in cam_mod.ini, most likely in the "mod_path" line.
I wrote about two Darkfate sources for the fonts. The second one is a group of fonts which was available on Darkfate.org in December of 2019. I do not know where (and how) I found them, but most likely, I began in the area called "Translations" on Darkfate. These fonts should also "repair" A. Stahl's T2 installation, but once again, we need to know where we have to place them, and for that, I need to know more about how A. Stahl's Russian Thief 2 version was made or installed.
A.Stahl on 15/8/2020 at 15:43
>_RussianPack/...
No, there is no such directory but there is a RES dir where lies "books.crf" (just renamed zip) which have many subdirs with graphical files (old pcx format) and textfont.fon file. In different subdirs there are different "textfont.fon" files. At least their sizes are different.
I feel like it would be aesier just to find an English version :(
baeuchlein on 15/8/2020 at 17:27
Quote Posted by A.Stahl
there is a RES dir where lies "books.crf" [...]
I feel like it would be aesier just to find an English version :(
No, what you describe actually sounds like a rather standard Thief 2 installation, and for that, getting readable cyrillic scrolls back might be rather easy.
Please look into the file
Darkinst.cfg in the main Thief 2 directory and look for a line beginning with "language". Post the line here. After that, it should be easier to tell how exactly this Thief 2 version has integrated the Russian language - and where we need to place the font files necessary to restore cyrillic letters.
