No quest info in Journal
 

I'm playing the English version, it was bought yesterday. Installation no prob, gameplay no prob - but one.

I've arrived at the Bandit Camp and have talked to various persons.
I've accepted several quests.

When talking to a person messages appear at the left stating that I've got a new quest (or that I've completed a quest). But whenever I turn to the Journal (by pressing L) none of it can be read.
In fact there's no text whatsoever in Current, Completed, Trader or Trainer. No information in World, Harbor town, Volcano Keep, Bandit Camp, All.

It's getting troublesome considering the amount of quests I've accepted. Since my discovery I've begun writing them down. But of course I can't write everthing down people are saying to me so I'm missing information.

In the Journal one can also view Maps. I've got the World Map and the Region Map. Not a Quest Map though.

Well, I'll try to complete the quests no matter what, I don't give up that easily, but it would be nice having a summary of what's been said, where + by whom.

Can't find any info about this problem thus far.
Since there are not many people yet who are able to play the game, I have sent an e-mail to Kochmedia support, but if somebody else could help me out or could tell me whether he/she has a blank Journal as well, I'd be thankful.

Seems like we'd be seeing this pop up a bit more since there seems to be a fair amount of folks already playing. Guess we'll see shortly.

Update. For those who face the same problem.

I have reinstalled the game. No change. I have reinstalled the game in a different language. No change. Installed the game on husbands PC: text in Journal! Right at the beginning, on the beach it already says you'll have to look for survivors.
Copied my saved games to his PC. All the info I'm missing on my PC is available on his PC. On his I can read all the quests I have done and the quests I'll yet have to do, including info in the Region Map. Which seems to be very handy. Which made me sad. Why isn't possible to get the same info on a good system like mine? (Spec of my system: Quad CPU, Q6700, NVDIA GeForce 9800 GTX, 4 Gig of memory, OS: XP)

Tiresome…

It's very obvious that 'your' graphics sysem is not rendering overlayed text (fonts) not sure exactly why that should be.

Video driver? - Mainboard/chipset drivers?

I'm having the same issue but not for all quests but only some. For some quests I can review the dialogue just fine and for other quests there's just the quest title but no further info and no possibility to review the dialogue. Seems like a bug to me. My system is well optimized. Latest DirectX, latest nVidia drivers, it's all up-to-date.

Just for experimental purposes only, i would try a lower resolution (as low as possible!) just to see if the minimum font render size is working.

For small font rendering, some graphics cards go to a minimum greeking acceptance level (below 6 or 5 font size) below this and the font is "dismissed" and fails to render.

Clutching at straws - but worth a try.

I don't have the game yet so this is just a guess, but do you anti aliasing or some other settings enabled in the Nvidia control panel? If so, try restoring the global settings to their defaults.

Yup, drivers. Had the same thought last night. After installing the latest video driver yesterday and starting Risen again first thing this morning the mouse seemed to stutter; it used to move smoothly. Journal: still no text. So I quickly decided to downgrade via an image. Forgot to secure some data before doing that (it was still pretty early and I was short of sleep), so a couple of hours of work went down the drain, all in vain.

I tried a different resolution, the lowest I could get. No text.

I disabled all the settings that were possible in the Nvidia control panel ( I created an override for Risen, the override is used automatically when Risen is launched). But an override turned out to be unnecessary because it had, alas, no effect.

Thanks guys, I really appreciate you thinking along with me.

Moriendor, glad to hear you have similar difficulties. :uneasy: Don't mean that, em, I mean that but… but you catch my drift, right?

Seems that this isn't confined to the English version, someone on the World of Risen forums is having the same problem with the French version.

http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum…d.php?t=684504

It's odd that they'd that let something this huge through testing.

Thanks for providing the link. On that World of Players Forum there's another person, a man from Belgium, that has come forward.

So there they've got the same as here: one who doesn't see any text in the Journal, the other one seems to be getting some ("a little bit after the end of the tutorial", after having played for "about one hour").

I read on the DS forum that you have to select the location before you can see the quests. Did you do this?

As I said in my first post:

As I said in my second post:

I'm not sure why but the issue seems to have gone for me. One thing I did is change a setting in the nVidia control panel (I have a GTX 260 + latest official driver 190.62). I turned "Ambient Occlusion" off under the Global Settings and I forced VSync to be "on" since I wanted to get rid of or at least decrease the (to my eyes) rather unsteady image (flickering/tearing).
Now there is still one quest from very early in the game in the "Done" category where I'm not getting any text but all other quest log entries do show the corresponding dialogue records now.

Good for you!

I seem to have no setting called 'Ambient Occlusion', I can't find it.
I changed theVsync to be 'on'. No effect, i.e. no text in any tab of the Journal. Alas.

Thanks for mentioning it.

Just want to make sure people realize that quests show up per location, so you have to click on the icons relating to where you got the quest.

some early quests don't have any quest text, just the title telling you what to do.

Hmm.. you mean you have no "Ambient Occlusion" on/off setting when you go to "Manage 3D Settings" in the nVidia control panel? It's the first item in "Global Settings" for me actually, right above "Anisotropic Filtering" (which I have set to application-controlled).
If you don't have that setting then it may depend on the so called CoolBits tweak which used to grant access to additional settings in the nVidia driver. I thought that it was outdated by now and have just been using it out of habit but maybe that "Ambient Occlusion" setting is one of those items you only get access to with CoolBits enabled.
To enable CoolBits you need to open the registry (Run -> regedit). Then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak . Now right-click and select "New". Choose "DWORD (32-bit) Value" from the list (or just DWORD if you "only" have a 32-bit OS). Hit "Enter" to edit the newly created DWORD entry. Rename it to "CoolBits" (case-sensitive I think so please pay attention to spelling it exactly like that), then hit "enter" again to assign a value and enter "3". Then restart your system and see if you have any additional options in the control panel now.

ok guys i got a solution for this problem
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/risen…708&pid=952152
basicly u have to change size of ur general typeface in windows options becouse u got 125% probobly or higher so just get it on 100% u will have to log off for settings to change and u will have text in journal, of course ur typeface in whole windows will be smaller untill some patch released so change comes with some price
u have to go to(i got windows 7) Control Panel-Appearance and personalization-display and change text size to 100%(defalult)
hope i helped :)

Thanks Moriendor, I appreciated your input.

I did all that, no effect, i.e. no text in Journal. After the restart I made JPGs of my registry and NVIDIA settings and I wanted to upload them so you'd be able to take a look at them when I saw the next post. Tried that first before uploading…

It worked, it worked! There's text in the Journal! I can see the current quests and the quests I have completed, and the trainers I've met, and… Oh, I'm so excited. You should be made Deep Silver/Piranha Bytes employee of the month! :)

I have XP. Here's what I changed:
Settings > Control Panel > Display > Appearance > Font Size: set to Normal*. It had immediate effect. No logging off or restart was necessary, but I'm the only user.

*Font size used to be large.

Thanks, Regirs. Thanks for taking the trouble of registering, becoming a member of RPGWatch, and mentioning this. Playing the game will be so much easier now… I could kiss you! :kiss:

And yes, I do hope there will be a patch that will fix this… So, if anyone of Risen, Deep Silver, Piranha Bytes or Koch Media is reading this, a patch would be most welcome!

By now off topic: "Manage 3D Settings" in the nVidia control panel.

@Moriendor

After changing the registry and adding a DWORD entry named "CoolBits" and giving it a value "3", just like you said, I still did not have an "Ambient Occlusion" on/off setting. I forgot to mention this before, as I wrote:
But it had to be: "I did all that, no effect, i.e. no text in Journal and still no setting "Ambient Occlusion" in the nVidia control panel.

You mentioned:
So maybe enabling CoolBits doesn't have anything to do with it, maybe it IS outdated, right? (I wouldn't know, I had never heard of CoolBits, did not know I could enable it, do I have HotBits as well? ;) )

I'll need some sexy pics before I can make that determination:biggrin:

I think TTIWWP!

—-

@ Omega: I just google'd a little and it seems like Ambient Occlusion is only supported on Vista machines but not Windows XP systems like yours. Sorry about causing you extra work and worries :blush: .

I tink I saw a Hotbit, I did, I did see a HotBit!

And another one, and another one… Gosh, I've got HotBits!
Pictures?
*Omega takes snapshot*




@Moriendor: no prob, no sweat. :) :kiss:

Omega, I have the exact same graphics card that you do, the NVidia 9800GTX, also using XP, 4 Gigs RAM, everything same except that you have a quad core CPU and I've still only got a duo, (the E8400 @3Ghz), and I can see the text in my quest log.

I've been bitten before, though, by fiddling too much with my grafix crd settings, and these days I've got my Nvidia panel settings on "default" and I've set it that individual game's settings get preference (in other words, I don't override them)

Anyway, I just thought I'd mention that to you, since I have the exact same card as yourself, and am also still using XP. :)

If you want to, I could try and help you by checking out what my settings are, but I just want to know if you tried simply setting your settings on "default" (Silly question, I know, but one often has to start with silly q's first)

Yep, it's the Large Fonts setting all right. Ouch. Now all I have to do is reboot before and after every play session. Or I guess I could {shudder} reduce my desktop size down a bunch. I don't have to run it at 2048x1536…

This topic isn't popping up on Google yet so I'm going to re-describe with an eye to key words…

When you bring up the journal with the (default) L key, it is blank. Empty. No icons, no text, no nothing. There are some scroll bars on the right side but they indicate that the whole page is displayed. The journal's quest map won't display because there's no way to click on a quest item, trainer, or anything else. Without a working journal, Risen starts getting to be a pain fast - especially if you've got a detective quest.

To fix this in Vista, just right click on your desktop and select Personalize. The option is on the left side of that first dialog box. It requires admin rights and a reboot, I'm afraid. (Normally, you turn the option on when you first set up your PC then leave it alone forever.)

Sweet of you, RivianWitch, to offer your help with the NVidia settings, but fortunately everything's working fine now. I guess you missed this one:


Back to Nvidia.

I don't know exactly whether my present settings are default or not. Like you I have a slight dislike changing them. During my Risen trouble I created an override specifically for Risen. Although it did not change anything this time, I'll remember that option next time.

Thanks again for offering your help.

So this problem is solved?

yes - there are two workarounds:

a) change the desktop resolution, before starting the game

or

b) change the windows font size from large to normal

No, changing the resolution does nothing. Only option b works. (Though you may want to change your desktop resolution if you turn off large fonts.)

Yes and no, Gorath. Yes, there's text in my Risen Journal now, but no, I would hate to see this issue not being dealt with. I prefer a larger font size when I'm not playing Risen. Lucky me, I do not have to reboot, but apparantly Vista users need to reboot every time they change the font size. So a patch would be most welcome I think.

Well, so far nothing works for me.

I got win XP.
I have the newest drivers for Nvidia

I have been trying to chance font sizes, I had/have default font size at 100% but tried to change it bigger and back to 100%
= not working

I have changed resolution in game and in windows
= not working

anyone got any new solution? its quite hard to solve the treasure hunt quest, cos I cant see the map where the locations are.

You can try to change the destop theme to "windows classic".

Perza - You may have to cycle thru the resolutions a couple times in-game, at least thats the way it seems to work for me. For as long as i'm playing or until they fix it we're gonna have to deal w/ this. To get the quest journal going, I have to

1- switch desktop setting to crummy "windows classic", and font sizes to default. Which sucks, as my high rez thing going on I crank all fonts up and the win95 looking interface has all the allure of, well, win95.

2 -cycle from minimum rez, to mid-rez, to max in the game, then back to whatever I'm using.

That works every time, eventually….

I suppose there IS a solution. Set your font size to your favorite size.
Then right click Risen.exe icon.
Go to "Compatibility" tab.
Click "Disable Visual Themes" check-box and put a tick next to it:
http://i.imagehost.org/0690/untitled.jpg
Check if it works.

After finishing the game some days ago I reset the font size to large. Without changing my present settings I loaded several saved games and it seems to work, yes. All info in Journal, including the Quest Map, is visible. Thanks, blackcanopus. Wish I had known this sooner, it's such a fine solution! Simple things usually are best. :)

An even easier solution would be for PB to fix the bug!

Omega
You're welcome, and sorry I was late.
At least this will be available for the people who will encounter that problem in the future.

I second that!

O, no prob, I was just trying to say how wonderful your solution was.

Exactly! :)

Thx so much, I have played 20 hours without any quest list and it was soo annoing, changing all the windows themes in XP to look like an windows 2000 worked.

I tried to change resolutions some 60 times and changing fonts and everything, but nothing. Though there was no solution for my problem :D

checking that box in shortcut didn't help, but thanks for advises! :)

So, the problem is solved from my part then. Thank you guys!