[Text] Animated Titles of Length Greater than 9 won't animate. (potential game crash)

asterelle

I noticed all of the new animated titles unlocked in this expansion are totally broken... except for "Gunner" which I unlocked today.

I did some comparisons between the titles Chinese titles and the English titles and have determined that the reason most of the titles are broken is that the length of the title is being used for the color cycling palette. The palette only supports up to 9 colors so any string of length greater than 9 is breaking the animation. Indeed all of these Chinese animated titles are of length less than or equal to 9. There is a potential buffer overrun here for indexing outside of allocated memory so it might be the case that some titles will crash the client. We won't know until people unlock them.

Beyond this limitation there is another issue in that the color cycle length is hard coded to the length of the Chinese title. So a title of that has in chinese has a length of 4 only has 4 colors set in the palette. If you try to replace that with string of length 8 but without updating the palette then half of the colors are going to be black which is ugly and hard to read.

The fix is obviously that the palette cycle length should defined separate of the string length but that's not the way it is currently implemented and since it would require a change in the title definition it would likely have to wait for another expansion.

For now maybe you should re-translate these titles so that the title length is equal to the length of the original chinese text. Even though this is short and restrictive at least we would have nice looking color cycling and will avoid a potential game crash.​​

asterelle

Update: The animation has now been fixed but black letters are incorrectly showing up for any title whose original chinese text had fewer than 9 characters. There aren't supposed to be any black letters and it's kinda ruining some of the animations.​​