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all the information text (except for the numbers and the words for the magnitude), names (except for star names) and other things have all had their letters replaced by question marks. does anyone here know what might have caused this.

I am using 1.5.3 and other than the text, i am having no problems.

the bluemarble guy wrote:all the information text (except for the numbers and the words for the magnitude), names (except for star names) and other things have all had their letters replaced by question marks. does anyone here know what might have caused this.

I am using 1.5.3 and other than the text, i am having no problems.

I can confirm this. There is a bit more discussion of it in the 1.5pre3 thread.

To resolve temporarily start Celestia via it's executable rather than by the shortcut.

i tried doing that, but that also did not work.

the bluemarble guy wrote:i tried doing that, but that also did not work.

Hrm, that's really weird. Still waiting to here from the dev team on this.

Do you have Celestia installed somewhere besides "C:\Program Files\Celestia"?

Question marks are shown when Celestia cannot find a character in one of Celestia's font files.

Your symptoms seem to indicate that Celestia cannot find its font files. Maybe they got deleted accidentally.

Or did you edit celestia.cnf to specify non-standard font files?

I would suggest reinstalling Celestia from scratch:

0. download a fresh copy of v1.5.0pre3
1. move your Addons to a safe place
2. uninstall Celestia using its uninstall program
3. delete any of Celestia's directories that did not get deleted by the uninstall
4. run the installation program again.
Be sure to select the options to associate URLs and such.

As I posted in the Celestia 1.5.0pre3 thread, this is definitely an issue with Celestia 1.5.0pre3. I do not have this issue with pre2. To check to see if I did something (which I know I didn't), I did the whole completely fresh install thing, and it still happens. Looks like this:




I tried all the different ways to start Celestia:

1. The .exe within the Celestia folder:


2. Desktop shortcut:


3. The little icon in the start menu:


4. The shortcut under All Programs:


They all have the issue with the question marks. Kolano and I both have Celestia 1.5.0pre3 installed in a non-standard directory (E:\Program Files\Celestia 1.5.0pre3 in my case), so maybe that has something to do with it.

What do you have set as your language locale?

It's shown in the menu window Control Panel/ Date,Time,Language and Regional Options/ Regional and Language Options/ Regional Options tab.

English (United States)

Well, I have to admit that I'm running out of guesses as to what might prevent Celestia from locating the right characters.

How about file access rights?
Did you install Celestia while running under a different userid than you're running under now?

Check the protection of Celestia's Fonts directory and of the font files in it to see if they allow your current userid to access them. In particular, check the font files that are specified in celestia.cfg. Is there anything different about them -- one from another?

selden wrote:Well, I have to admit that I'm running out of guesses as to what might prevent Celestia from locating the right characters.

How about file access rights?
Did you install Celestia while running under a different userid than you're running under now?

Check the protection of Celestia's Fonts directory and of the font files in it to see if they allow your current userid to access them. In particular, check the font files that are specified in celestia.cfg. Is there anything different about them -- one from another?

I only have/use a single user. This issue is not a configuration issue on our machines, but a problem somewhere in the code of Celestia.

last week I installed 1.5pre3 on a work laptop (not mine) and saw similar results. As far as I can tell it ran xp pro with sp2 on a dell mobile p4 2.4 ghz and a mobility radeon 7500 graphics card with a very old driver. My laptop doesn't have this problem. ????
cartrite

Kolano wrote:I only have/use a single user.

Ditto.

selden wrote:Check the protection of Celestia's Fonts directory and of the font files in it to see if they allow your current userid to access them. In particular, check the font files that are specified in celestia.cfg. Is there anything different about them -- one from another?

No Issues with permissions, and both the font definitions and the files themselves are identical.

I think this is an internationalization issue . . . For some reason, you have to explicitly set the LANGUAGE environment variable, otherwise Celestia doesn't get the right strings. From a command line:

set LANGUAGE=en

(for English . . .)

Then, run Celestia from that command window. I'll try and figure out why Celestia isn't automatically defaulting to English strings.

--Chris

chris wrote:From a command line:

set LANGUAGE=en

(for English . . .)

Then, run Celestia from that command window.

That worked. Quite the hassle to start Celestia that way.

Isn't there a shortcut to starting it like that, like a batch file or something? I guess I should learn how

You can make it permanent for the entire system by using the Control Panel/ Regional and Languages menu.

selden wrote:You can make it permanent for the entire system by using the Control Panel/ Regional and Languages menu.

selden wrote:What do you have set as your language locale?

It's shown in the menu window Control Panel/ Date,Time,Language and Regional Options/ Regional and Language Options/ Regional Options tab.

Johaen wrote:English (United States)

selden wrote:You can make it permanent for the entire system by using the Control Panel/ Regional and Languages menu.

No I can't. Even with mine set to "English (United States)" I still have the question marks issue.

The following batch file seems to do the job though...


If one did want to set this globally, that can theoretically be done via...

Control Panel\System\Advanced\Environmental Variables...\New

Variable Name:LANGUAGE
Variable Value:en

Is anyone seeing this problem when they install 1.5.0pre3 using the self-extracting installer? Or is it only a problem when building from CVS?

--Chris

chris wrote:Is anyone seeing this problem when they install 1.5.0pre3 using the self-extracting installer? Or is it only a problem when building from CVS?

--Chris

I am seeing it with the 1.5.0pre3 self-extracting installer.

I install to a non-standard location "C:\My Programs\Celestia", but I still see the issue if I copy the Celestia folder to it's standard "C:\Program Files\Celestia" location.

chris wrote:Is anyone seeing this problem when they install 1.5.0pre3 using the self-extracting installer? Or is it only a problem when building from CVS?

--Chris

All of my results (and corresponding question marks) are from the 1.5.0pre3 .exe installer thingy. I haven't touched CVS.