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Non-Latin Characters

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
edited March 2010 in The Academy
Is it possible to put non-Latin characters into the text boxes in Star Trek: Online? I.E. My three ships have been Apollo, Athena, and Asclepius. Could I have made them Ἀπόλλων, Ἀθηνᾶ, and Ἀσκληπιός? I tried copy-pasting on the Athena, but it didn't like it. Can I use ALT+Codes? The Tsiolkovsky did use Cyrillic characters on its dedication plaque, in The Next Generation, so it's not totally out of universe. I'm a Classics Major so stuff like this makes me happy when it works. :P
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  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    hehe I wish kanjis then...
    but I don't think it's going to happen. After all in canon ST ship names in the hull always been roman letters ... altho alien ships never had names as far as I remind.. or probably them own alphabet hmm...
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Alt codes do not work for ship names. *shrug*

    I wish they had. Mjollnir doesn't look as cool without the
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    No issues with an
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Is it possible to put non-Latin characters into the text boxes in Star Trek: Online? I.E. My three ships have been Apollo, Athena, and Asclepius. Could I have made them Ἀπόλλων, Ἀθηνᾶ, and Ἀσκληπιός? I tried copy-pasting on the Athena, but it didn't like it. Can I use ALT+Codes? The Tsiolkovsky did use Cyrillic characters on its dedication plaque, in The Next Generation, so it's not totally out of universe. I'm a Classics Major so stuff like this makes me happy when it works. :P

    Bah. It's all Greek to me.
    /rimshot


    Sorry, I couldn't resist....
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    ArievDhien wrote:
    No issues with an
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    ArievDhien wrote:
    No issues with an
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    kamui wrote: »
    Bah. It's all Greek to me.
    /rimshot


    Sorry, I couldn't resist....

    You cheeky monkey. :|
    I used to play a game that allowed you to use symbols in your ship name, and commuication was beyond difficult to impossible in battle. I was always forced to leave them to die because I couldn't talk to them. It's cool to look at, but difficult to work with in a team atmosphere.

    That's my only issue with it - as stated, the simple addition of the umlaut is fine (that's what it's called, right? I can never remember how to spell it... I hope I didn't just say something offensive in a foreign language or something) as that still gives a general idea of what the underlying name is... but it does still tend to make communication a bit difficult if you can't remember how to reference those kinds of things easily. Other over-letter inflections I can see also being fine... but anything more complex (like the hard Greek [Roman? Latin, then]) then that is a major point of disagreement as at least with the Anglicized version of the name I can start to get an idea of how to pronounce it and it's easier for me to throw you a message or refer to you in combat, yanno?

    If it weren't for that, I wouldn't mind at all.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    I was thinking it might be easier to use those characters if we were on a voice based system; you know, where if you wanted to contact, say, the Mjollnir you would say, "Hail Mjollnir" and then go on with the message. But then...I thought about the pronunciation of 'Mjollnir'....
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Umlaut is correct for
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Should all be UTF8 internally, but obviously anything our font doesn't have a character won't work. As for input, thats all up to your IME.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    coderanger wrote:
    Should all be UTF8 internally, but obviously anything our font doesn't have a character won't work. As for input, thats all up to your IME.

    Idle curiosity, which way do you resolve Han unification?

    (Background for the gallery: a given UTF-8 application can only render one of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean without adding special support for string language labelling; you have to pick a language-specific font)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Miiru wrote:
    Idle curiosity, which way do you resolve Han unification?

    (Background for the gallery: a given UTF-8 application can only render one of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean without adding special support for string language labelling; you have to pick a language-specific font)
    We don't have any asian characters in our fonts, so it will all look the same :-)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    coderanger wrote:
    We don't have any asian characters in our fonts, so it will all look the same :-)

    Unless things have changed in the last several years, asian fonts are going to cause more issues than they solve anyway.

    The main problem lies in the fact that they're treated as a graphic, instead of text, which means each character has to be rendered by the GPU. When I played Shadowbane, the biggest PvP exploit in the game was spamming chat with asian symbols, which lagged your opponents to a standstill, allowing you to kill them at leisure. All you had to do to avoid being lagged yourself (on a non asian computer system) was to delete the font file from the game directory (which was reinstalled every time the patcher ran... a major pita).

    If this is still the case, better not to have the asian fonts at all. It's just going to cause a rash of exploits, etc... that will do more to hurt the game than help it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    The main problem lies in the fact that they're treated as a graphic, instead of text, which means each character has to be rendered by the GPU.

    That's a bug in a rendering engine. Different engines may or may not duplicate it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    The main problem lies in the fact that they're treated as a graphic, instead of text, which means each character has to be rendered by the GPU.

    That is likely far less a problem today than in the past. I'm seeing far less games today write their own font rendering routines, and today's graphics cards are monsters. If they can't render some text, be it vector or bitmapped, you have a poorly made engine.

    I would agree with Miiru - it sounds a lot like a bug specific to the engine rather than something that would affect all engines.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    ArievDhien wrote:
    Umlaut is correct for
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    All I can say is good luck on getting these different characters in, people are resistant to the simple idea of Port, Starboard, Forward and Aft for shields. If they cannot grasp Port = Left and Starboard = Right, I would not hold much hope for people getting those non "standard" characters.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    kamui wrote: »
    I dunno. A game company that wanted to allow voice commands could include a speech program that you, the player, would train. Much like Microsoft voice does, you read prepared statements into the computer, it tracks how you make sounds. Whether our technology has gotten that far for it to be utilizable in a game I dunno. But maybe someday....

    Pronounciation being an issue here. Especially with a multi-national player base many of whom do not speak English as their primary language.

    Same issue with Non-Latin alphabet characters. Im not even going to begin to guess how to pronounce or type anything in Cyrillic or Asian characters because I dont speak or understand Russian or any Asian languages.

    I know other MMOs usually have seperate clients/servers for Russia and Asia (Wow for example has seperate server pools for US, Europe, Russia, mainland China, S Korea, and Taiwan)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Hence the need to 'train' your computer to your personal voice. Even Elmer Fudd can use a speech program as long as he's trained it to his voice.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Oh and forcing every player to use and train voice commands is a good solution? I don't really see the advantage over sticking to the alphabeth we have now. I certainly wouldn't want to start training any voice commands just to have a
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Who, in this thread, has said anything whatsoever about forcing anyone to do anything? Why are you taking a suggestion for an OPTIONAL feature which probably won't even be available technologically speaking for quite some time and getting bent out of shape over something that no one has said? Is it because you just can't stand to see a benign thread with no drama in it? Must EVERY thread devolve into a fight?

    I stated an idea of something that MIGHT, one day in the FUTURE, be possible. Don't like it? Then CONGRATULATIONS! Lucky you! You don't have to worry about someone putting a gun to your head and FORCING you to use it because it doesn't even exist yet. You should go out and buy a lotto ticket, you're so lucky today.

    Want to know who may advantage from voice commands? Parapalegics. There are a few who actually play this game using voice commands. People with arthritis; this game happens to have an older crowd and waddayaknow! Our joints ain't what they used to be. People who move slowly either because of age, illness, or injury. It's MUCH faster to say, "Full throttle, reinforce shields, high yield torpedo" then it is for some people to move the mouse to those buttons while moving their ship.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Don't know about all this voice command stuff, but it would be nice to simply have accents and the basic foreign characters available for ship names. I'm not too displeased with it as it stands, of course, but if it was to be expanded, I'd consider the following lists to be the only ones included:

    Accents: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html
    Foreign characters: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html#foreign

    Sticking with the Windows alt-key codes makes it simpler to manage, though I'd leave out the punctuation. But that's 71 characters in total, and I'm not sure the effort would be worth it in the end.
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