Menus and text appear broken/messed up in Tales of Symphonia steam game

[Shovelvictory]

EDIT: Problem solved.

[Shovelvictory]

Originally posted by Make:

By common problems, I suppose you mean sec###.tmp error (caused by VMProtect). Did you apply any fixes like Kaldaien's "tsfix" or Durante's "GeDoSaTo"?

All text seems scrambled... not sure if it's related to localization files. What happens if you switch to Italian or Spanish instead of English?

Ah sorry for not being specific. By common problems I was mostly referring starting it up and actually getting it to work before the recent patches. I've actually been trying Gedosato but have been having a very hard time wrapping my head around it. Haven't heard of "tsfix" though! Is that something that I should be looking into?

I just switched the languages and its still the exact same problem :/ .

[Shovelvictory]

Ugh, this entire thing has been a headache. Thanks for the great recommendations thus far : )! If anybody else has any other thoughts on this matter please do let me know.

[Prospect Theorist]

That looks like an encoding problem to me, where your OS is expecting a certain language, and the game is sending text encoded in a different one. What do you have your system default Unicode language set as?

[Shovelvictory]

Originally posted by Corundum:

That looks like an encoding problem to me, where your OS is expecting a certain language, and the game is sending text encoded in a different one. What do you have your system default Unicode language set as?

Its set to default English from what I can see.

[scrungy]

Hey Phoenix, mind posting your ASUS' specs? Just curious as this is also happening on my HP G60 laptop.

[Punished Azuron (modérateur)]

This happens on my Medion laptop too, also with Windows 7.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Corundum:

That looks like an encoding problem to me, where your OS is expecting a certain language, and the game is sending text encoded in a different one. What do you have your system default Unicode language set as?

This game doesn't even use Unicode, as much as that frustrates me. I write all my software with Unicode support, and then incredibly, a lot of Asian games wind up ported to Windows without it. I sit there completely flabbergasted as they use ANSI for everything and then stuff like this happens.

Not only is it a portability issue, but Unicode software actually runs faster on Windows than ANSI. It has been this way since Windows 2000.

[Crache]

If you have a laptop that has both an Intel HD GPU and an Nvidia GPU, make sure that your Nvidia GPU is being used to play Tales of Symphonia. Garbled text is a very common issue with Intel HD GPUs. I'm not actually sure if you can do this properly for it, since TOS spits out a sec*.tmp and you might not be able to easily specify which GPU to use, but it's possible you can go into your Nvidia control panel and force it to always use the Nvidia GPU instead of the Intel HD one somewhere in those settings. You can also try updating your Intel HD drivers to see if that helps, as the only solution I've seen which works while still using the Intel is to switch to a different driver version.

I would have said this sooner, but I didn't see this post until now.

[Bomb Bloke]

Originally posted by Kaldaien:

This game doesn't even use Unicode, as much as that frustrates me.

If that's the case, then it suggests that tweaking the Windows display setting for non-Unicode applications to Japanese might have an effect. I'm sorta guessing the game is trying to display an error message and failing miserably.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/change-system-locale#1TC=windows-7

To be clear, this is different to changing the overall system language.

[Crache]

Originally posted by Bomb Bloke:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/change-system-locale#1TC=windows-7

To be clear, this is different to changing the overall system language.

The game probably doesn't care about the system locale, especially for a Steam game where language settings are handled by Steam. I have almost complete confidence that it's an Intel HD GPU issue and forcing the Nvidia GPU will absolutely solve his issue. Have seen this same exact issue countless times and that's invariably what it is.

[Bomb Bloke]

Regarding Intel cards, I can't say I've seen any garbled text with them, but what I have seen is a lot of driver crashes. These've always been fixed by updating, but that's easier said than done - Windows tends to rely on the laptop manufacturer's idea of what the latest driver should be, rather than, say, Intel's. Meaning that by default it'll hand you obsolete drivers and may even reject the correct ones.

Which is just one reason why I'm not terribly happy about the way Windows 10 manages software updates. It's been known to swap out newer drivers with older ones simply because the system manufacturers aren't keeping up with the times. The NVidia debacle (where computers would get stuck in a rebooting loop while NVidia's updating software and 10's own updating mechanics constantly switched between a newer and an older driver release) would probably be the most well-known example of this, but I'd imagine it's also causing problems for a lot of Intel HD users (whether they know it or not).

Originally posted by Crache:

... especially for a Steam game where language settings are handled by Steam.

... they're sorta handled by Steam. The idea is that you can switch releases of a game using its Steam properties panel. But there's nothing stopping a developer from putting multiple language strings into one single build (or simply putting the wrong ones in full stop): Steam's got no control over what happens in that case; Namco would be to blame for any related problems.

Anyway, there's no harm in testing either solution. :)