Font problems in original missions (non-English version)

A.Stahl on 15/8/2020 at 17:59

Quote Posted by baeuchlein

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.

Darkinst.cfg:
language english

I've tried to add (or replace) "english" to "russian" but that lead only to segfault and absolutely nothing interesting in Thief2.log. But before segfault it did draw the menu without any letters.

baeuchlein on 16/8/2020 at 02:58

Quote Posted by A.Stahl

Did you ever try
language russian+english
in Darkinst.cfg? That way, you tell the game to first look for sounds, texts and fonts in folders called "russian". If it does not find a certain file in there, it would then look in folders called "english". I guess that would work, although it would most likely not change anything compared with the current setting. But neither would the the segfault happen, nor would the game display an empty menu.

If that works as I said (meaning there is no segfault and no empty menu either), but the scrolls have their cyrillic letters back, then this should be finished.

If there is no segfault and no empty menu, but there are no cyrillic letters in scrolls either, then you need to download the cyrillic fonts from Darkfate.org and place them in folders called russian.

The following is a long and detailed description of what you have to do. It is actually not very complicated, but I want to make sure that nothing goes wrong, and therefore, it is a rather long explanation. Please do not be afraid or held back by this.

To download the cyrillic fonts, visit (www.darkfate.org) and select "Translations" (below the "Fan Missions" header). Of course, the actual selection will be in Russian, but since I don't speak Russian, I have to rely on a Google Translation of Darkfate.org. I hope you will still find your way with these directions there.

After selecting "Translations" below the "Fan Missions" line on the left, select "Thief 2" on the new page, then "needful_stuff". You will see three things available for download: Some unfinished fonts, t2fonts.rar and t2fonts_new.rar. The last file most likely is your best choice. Download it.

Unpack this archive with 7z or something like WinRAR. That should give you something you might recognize from books.crf: A group of sub-folders with textfont.fon files inside. Now you only need to copy the textfont.fon files to the right folders in your Thief 2 installation.

Look into your Thief 2 main folder. There should be no folder called books there. If there is one, look into it and tell me what is inside - maybe we can find out what's wrong then.

However, if there is no books folder in the Thief 2 folder, as I expect, then we can continue. Inside your Thief 2 main folder, create the folder books, then go back to the folders where you unpacked the .rar file. Go into the folder books there, and copy the folders parch, parch2 and parch3, with all files and folders in these "parch folders", into the folder books you created in the Thief 2 main folder.

Now, go into the parch folder you just copied. There should be a textfont.fon file in there. It has to be moved into a new folder called Russian in here. Create the folder Russian, then move textfont.fon into this folder. After that, you should have a complete path to this file which looks like this: books\parch\Russian\textfont.fon.

Do the same for the files in parch2 and parch3. Start Thief 2 and look for a scroll. This time, it should really be russian language with cyrillic letters!

If any other readables (some books, for example) have no cyrillic letters while they should, you can apply the same procedure to the other folders and files in the folder where you unpacked the download from Darkfate.org in the first place. You should be able to get Thief 2 up and running with full Russian support once again.

If anything goes wrong, come back and tell us what happened. Maybe we can pull another rabbit out of a hat, then.;)

A.Stahl on 16/8/2020 at 04:07

>Maybe we can pull another rabbit out of a hat, then.

Well, after some experiments -- nothing changed. Nothing regarding readability. The font in those documents which were readable has actually changed, so, I suppose, all this copying was done correctly. Maybe the fonts are good after all and it is the texts which are corrupted? Can you please search for another rabbit?

A.Stahl on 16/8/2020 at 09:41

Well, no need in rabbits for me: I've found and installed the English version.

baeuchlein on 18/8/2020 at 18:39

Quote Posted by A.Stahl

Well, no need in rabbits for me: I've found and installed the English version.

Probably a better choice. I would have looked for corrupted book texts as well now, but that would mean that the books.crf file had been damaged without any program detecting it - rather uncommon.

If you want Russian back, you can always pack your current English installation into a .zip or .7z archive, and then apply the "Russification patch" from DarkFate.org. If anything goes wrong, or if any other problems crop up, you could then just delete the non-functional installation, restore your archive, and have a fully functional installation again in minutes. I'm regularly backing up Thief installations like this after applying patches and such, and make frequent use of the packed installations. No more wrestling around with damaged installations, just trash them and get a working one back easily.