Graphical Clarity Issue(Text Only)

B

Branair

Dalayan Beginner
Hey, I've had a bit of a strange issue since I bought and began to use an Envision 19" LCD monitor. Basically, all text displays in-game have become.. Jagged. Unclear. Pics attached for clarity.



The way things used to look, and the way things still look after using the in-game screenshot function.


A mild example of the text problem can be seen here, mostly in the main chatting boxes, but also to a less significant extent even on my spell gems.


The best example of the problem I could whip together, various out-of-place artifacts that look something like semicolons and parts of brackets can be seen accompanying normal text. Also note that the problem appears to be more severe on some horizontal planes than others(note the stats displayed on the waistguard in comparison to the teddy bear's effect).


The screenshots don't really do the problem justice, as after a few minutes of game time the strain of reading through the garbled artifacts becomes extremely irritating. I've also noticed that when I open the start menu(I play in windowed mode), a strange problem occurs, but only until the start menu is closed again.

That's not irritating really, just an anomoly I thought I would attach.

Anyway. I have played SoD on a Pentium 4 Dual Core 3.2ghz machine with a gig of RAM and a GeForce 6600 for quite some time now with no problems whatsoever. The text artifacts in question only showed up after swapping out my old CRT for the previously mentioned new LCD. My video card drivers are fully up-to-date(93.71).

I've tried playing the game at various refresh rates to see if there would be any effect on the display to no avail. Ditto resolutions, color depths. I'm at a loss as to what I should do now. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. As it stands, I'm going to attempt to re-install my video card drivers once more to see if it has any sort of beneficial effect.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Edit: Information I forgot to add.
I'm running Windows XP SP2

Sorry if I'm at all unclear, if there's anything I need to elaborate on, I would be happy to do so if at all possible.

Edit2: Repatching my video card drivers had no discernible effect.
 
I'm entirely sure, Bran, but that looks like it might have something to do with the apeture size, or more specifically, the distance between them, on your monitor. Additionally, I vaguely remember reading something about the 19" LCDs having issues when running real high resolutions - up around 1900x1200 or so, I don't think that is your issue though but it might be something to check into.

Sst
 
Hi bran,

might help: I have the exact same problem when I forget to switch my monitor's resolution to the games resolution before I start SoD.
 
Well, I play and run at the same resolution(1280x1024), so I don't think that's it. I just tried lowering my natural resolution and in-game resolution and see if that helps, hadn't thought of that, but there was no effect.

I also noticed today that the text issue even shows up at the login screen, character select, /any/ part of the the Game client with text, really, not just "in game."

I don't know anything about apeture sizes or if I can manipulate them at all/what exactly they are, but I'll look into that, and post if I find any way to fix my own problem.

Thanks for the helpful posts, I appreciate it.

Edit: I also keep both my natural and in-game refresh rates the same, currently they are both at 75hz, but I have also tried 70, 72, and 60, the available in-game settings with no visible change.
 
Have you tried running it in widescreen? And I assume that the screenshots are without EQW? You can also try using EQW.
 
Branair said:
The screenshots don't really do the problem justice, as after a few minutes of game time the strain of reading through the garbled artifacts becomes extremely irritating. I've also noticed that when I open the start menu(I play in windowed mode), a strange problem occurs, but only until the start menu is closed again.
Click to expand...

I do use EQW.

I haven't tried running it widescreen though, didn't know that was an option. Is that something I'd have to alter in the in-game options, or the login screen options? If I figure it out on my own, I'll try it out.

My monitor is not widescreen, however, so I doubt there will be much effect.
 
No improvement from any tried methods so far, I'm reinstalling and repatching completely to see if that helps. :psyduck:
 
Set your screen resolution to the maximum and then run your SoD window with EQW at the resolution you want. My guess would be that the LCD monitor is set lower than the maximum, which tends to pixelate text. Give it a shot and see how it looks.
 
I get the ugly text problem like that sometimes too. The solution? Make sure your ingame video options are set to full screen. EQ's native windowed mode is what causes this.
 
Well, my native screen resolution is at its max(1280x1024), and I've tried the in-game resolution on various levels without any results. I've also made sure that my "play in full screen" button in-game is depressed, and have tried playing with it both on and off in EQW still without any results. Something interesting I have noticed is that the pixellation seems to work in horizontal "bars:" if I drag a window containing text up and down on the screen, parts of it go from having the goofed-upedness to not having the goofed-upedness to having the goofed-upedness again relative to their vertical position. Not sure what that could mean.
 
Tried reinstalling DirectX today, heard that helps some graphical issues, but saw no changes.
Quite an irritating little problem, this.

Edit: It may be a font issue. I just tried changing in-game font to Courier to see if anything were different, and while there are still some issues(text becomes "fuzzier" along those same horizontal lines), the particles are gone. I'm going to play around with it and see if I can reach something manageable, but this information might help.

Edit 2: It's looking more and more like a font issue, each font has its own way of reacting along those horizontal lines. Some get very pixellated, some just get fuzzy, others are completely illegible, but each seems to have its own little problem.

I'm going to stick with Courier New for now. The problem is still there, but severely toned down- I can deal with a little bit of fuzziness. I'm interested in any ideas as to what's gone wrong, or ways I might fix the problem though.
 
That sounds more and more like the apetures that I mentioned earlier - unfortunately, they are not modifiable. They are the little holes that the electrons flow through to hit the backside of the actual screen. There are more of them horizontally than vertically so, horizontally the monitor is able to allow more of the signal through than vertically - monitors (both lcd and crt) are only able to compensate so much for the vertical spacing. The fewer "holes" available the more the monitor has to compensate eventually the monitor can't overcome the spacing between the apetures and some of the signal that is supposed to flow thorugh apeture a flows through apeture b...thus text looks squashed in a horizontal pattern. The reason that the fonts seem to help is that different fonts are different sizes which allow for different compensation rates - I haven't tried but I suspect that if you adjusted the font size larger you would see improvement.

Sorry for the textbook explanation and I hope it made sense. Hope you are able to get to a better spot - visually, heh :)

Sst
 
<- Branair.

So I finally fixed my problem, but the solution makes me :tinfoil: pretty hard. I noticed for a while, after installing a new game, that the visual problem would come and go seemingly at random. As time progressed, I realized that the problem seemed to happen much less frequently after playing this other game. After a little testing, I realized that the problem completely vanished if I open and close said other game before playing SoD, and the curative effects last until my next reboot when I must open and close said game another time. The only unusual thing the game does is force my monitor into a resolution of 640x480.

Suffice to say, I can fix my problem now, but I'm not sure why.
 
I would go with Sstecik on that, its hardware in your monitor. Ive seen this problem with some LCD screens ( outside this game) and mostly i would play with the monitor menu to make it look better. In your situation, where the problem only occurs in game its a little more annoying to play with the monitor setting because you would then have to readjust it for normal non game use.

Are you sure it is only in the game you are having this problem? If the problem is also in other programs (Word processor, net explorer, wnz XP) modifing the monitor setting might be a solution.

IF it is only in the game, my personal solution ( i do get this problem too) is to find the good resolution that will make it work.

I had to go trough the alt-o screen setting to find the good one because in the general option (before the log screen) not all resolution are there. I tried many resolution but found that playing window mode from EQW with same refresh as winxp and a resolution that make the EQwindow slightly smaller than actual screen works.
 
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