Introversion

I just acquired Uplink via the Humble Bundle and am trying to start playing it on my machine (Linux x64). When I run the tutorial the text box that pops up is only 3 lines tall and keeps wrapping text out of the box. It doesn't appear to register any scroll wheel requests so I can read all of the text that is being displayed. I've tried several different resolutions and they all seem to have this issue.

Is there a way to increase the size of the text box?

The tutorial box is 3 lines tall. And I think the wheel mouse isn't supported.

Could you provide a screenshot?

Try running it windowed?

If I remember correctly, Uplink do bad things to text if the screen resolution is somehow not the resolution Uplink thinks it's running.

I also recently purchased Uplink via the humble indie bundle and am experiencing the same problem.

I've tried several different resolutions as well as running it full screen and windowed.



Any suggestions? I using Linux x86.

Yes the above screenshot is pretty much what I'm running into. I've run through all of the available resolutions and have this issue with all of them.

hmmm, the fonts looks strange.

Uplink use TrueType fonts.

Other Introversion games use images for font rendering.

On Windows Uplink use the gltt library to get the fonts. On Linux it used to be ftgl library (maybe the latest builds changed this). I think on both platform it needs freetype library.

Could it be that one of these libraries do something strange on your system?

I fixed this on my system by doing the following:

Download the Uplink 1.55 tar.gz patch from here:
http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/otherfiles.html

Untar the file and copy the libfreetype.so.6 file from the patch, located in the lib directory, to your game's lib directory.

I'm not using the rpm version of the game or patch.

I can read the tutorial and the font looks better! Let us know if this works.

For the curious, after frenchfrog's comment about the truetype fonts, I poked around with strace and ldd and noticed
that the game looks for the libfreetype.so.6 file in the game's lib directory before loading the system version of the library.

The versions of the library in the patch and on my system are different.

Guess I'll have to switch to the 32bit version to try that. There doesn't seem to be a patch for x64.

Just a follow on, yes using the 32bit version with that library from the patch does fix the problem. So the problem is definitely with the newer version of libfreetype apparently.

Both silver and tykeal are on Fedora 14 with the same version of freetype-2.4.2-5.fc14.

I think we have the culprit.

silver wrote:I'm using Fedora 14 (2.6.35.14-103.fc14.i686). The freetype package is freetype-2.4.2-5.fc14.i686

The package info is:
---
$ rpm -qi freetype-2.4.2-5.fc14.i686
Name : freetype Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version : 2.4.2 Vendor: Fedora Project
Release : 5.fc14 Build Date: Wed 20 Jul 2011 09:46:28 AM PDT
Install Date: Fri 07 Oct 2011 09:28:22 PM PDT Build Host: x86-11.phx2.fedoraproject.org
Group : System Environment/Libraries Source RPM: freetype-2.4.2-5.fc14.src.rpm
Size : 788936 License: FTL or GPLv2+
Signature : RSA/SHA256, Wed 20 Jul 2011 07:10:27 AM PDT, Key ID 421caddb97a1071f

---

$ md5sum /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6
05a4478442173c0e00f0cf347bba77d9 /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6

tykeal wrote:$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Fedora release 14 (Laughlin)
$ rpm -qf /usr/lib64/libfreetype.so.6
freetype-2.4.2-5.fc14.x86_64

$ rpm -q freetype
freetype-2.4.4-6.fc15.x86_64