I had this problem and solved it, but maybe somebody else will find this useful…

When starting the game under Windows 7 on an AMD HD6850, all menu and in-game text was missing.

I contacted support and tried lots of stuff:
- reinstalling pretty much everything
- changing graphics driver settings
- getting custom config files from the internet because they can only be edited in-game [microrant: what kind of person would use an encrypted config file? why?!]
- etc

The only thing that works for me is running the game as administrator.
This can be done by entering the game folder, right clicking the "Launch This War of Mine" Shortcut and in the shortcut settings, under compatibility, set the program to run as administrator for all users. This will prompt you for the admin password every time you start the game, even under Galaxy, but the game will run with all ingame text visible.

There may be a way of automatically running the game as administrator without entering the password every time using Task Scheduler as described, for example, here: [url=]https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/655967-allowing-user-to-run-a-program-without-admin-password?page=1#entry-4042514[/url] but I didn't get that to work.

All of this, of course, is just a workaround. Let's hope for a patch.

I have the same problem:
- windows 10 64 bit
- Nvidia card
- nothing set in the control panel (if you search for this problem all people are using AMDs with forced AA in the control panel)

I will not run the game as admin to test if that works, sorry but I do not run games as admnistrator. Rolling back to patch 1.4 the game works fine (I put 60 hours on patch 1.4 many months ago). Anything after that (2.2 or 3.0.2) has the invisible text issue.

The game is currently unplayable.

Same problem here, first answer from Support doesn't help.

Hope they get this fixed soon

got this answer 20 minutes ago:

Hello,
If running game as administrator solves your issue, then I'm afraid that you will have to do that. Please boot the game as administrator, and use administrator account to run it in the future.
I'm sorry if this is inconvenience for you.
Regards,
Dr Cat
Customer Support Representative
GOG.com

Yeah......dont know what to say

Since the developer doesn't seem to be watching this forum, is there a way to contact them about this issue? It could be something pretty simply that they overlooked and easy to fix.

I've only managed to contact them on Facebook. They indeed don't seem to be active on these forums.

Running This War of Mine on Windows 10 as administrator did not do me any good. Text is still missing.

I have two Windows 10 PCs, one has this problem and one doesn't.

I tried everything in this thread and everything else I could think of to fix the problem.

My PCs are nearly identical software and settings wise, down to using the same version of nVidia drivers.

The one that has the problem is an older system with an ancient AMD Phenom II 965 CPU and nVidia GTX 960.

The one that works has a much newer Intel i7-6700HQ processor with a nVidia GTX 960M.

Since the biggest difference between my PCs are the CPUs, my wild guess it's something to do with that, such as a missing extension the game now uses. Version 1.4 did work fine on this PC, just the newer versions are broken.

@MikeMaximus

Now this is interesting...

System 1 (newly built): AMD Ryzen 1600X and Sapphire Radeon Fury:
No problems with text in TWOM

System 2 (soon to be retired): AMD Phenom II X4 955 (@225x16=3600MHz stable) and Powercolor Radeon 270X: Text missing at first, but applying workaround does the trick.

CPU extensions supported according to CPU-Z:

System 1: MMX (+), SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, SSE4A, x86-64, AMD-V, AES, AVX, AVX2, FMA3
System 2: MMX (+), 3DNow! (+), SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4A, x86-64, AMD-V

So CPU extensions seemed quite a good guess for me, but then I thought:
If the game engine depends on an unsupported CPU extension I can't see how this anti-aliasing workaround could have ever worked for me...
But it definitly does, just re-checked. Maybe it's triggering another code part (some math library used for AA) in the engine? Unfortunately I have no clue whether TWOM uses a widespread engine. (So one could check those other games for the same weird behaviour.)

This sounds like an X-File... ;-)

(Just for the sake of completeness: The latest TWOM + LitteOnes is installed on both systems. No problems on earlier versions.)

I finally figured out what else can cause this missing text problem.

The game stores it's fonts and localization information in "C:\Users\*User*\Documents\This War of Mine", instead of the game installation folder, where it would actually make sense.

On my machine with the missing text problem, both C:\Users\*User*\Documents\This War of Mine\LocalizationPacks and C:\Users\*User*\Documents\This War of Mine\LocalizationBinFonts were empty for some reason. And on my machine that was working they were filled with various fonts and data.

I deleted that folder from Documents and re-installed the game with Galaxy, which fixed it finally by re-installing the missing fonts and information to the Documents folder.

So basically if something happens to that folder in Documents, all in-game text will disappear. This is likely the reason why some people have to run the game as administrator, so they have proper access to the Documents folder where the fonts and localization data got installed.

I'm not sure why the devs are storing required game data in that location, it's horribly bad practice.

It's fixed.
thanks !

How is the other contents working for you, guys? Does Franko never appear for you after the 3rd day? Yours biographies update just with the simple commmentaries about bad/good actions and status like hungry and disease?

Thank you, this worked for me. I have an RX 480 card but using your settings the menu can be seen now. :)

OMG, that finally fixes this damn issue which I've been hunting for >1 year now, even reported it to devs official support email (never received a reply btw). THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Yes, on my system I install applications as a different user (an admin user) than the user I use to run them as (a non-priviledged user) so installing TWoM installed those font files in the administrator user directory (instead of game directory) and then tried to read them from my regular user directory when running so it could not and thus displayed no fonts.

I added this solution to the relevant pcgamingwiki section and used your post as reference link, THANKS AGAIN!
https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/This_War_of_Mine#Can.27t_see_menus_.2F_overlays