GZDoom localization development thread [Split]

[Graf Zahl]

I have been thinking more about this issue and ultimately have to ask if Unicode lump name support is really necessary. It requires a lot of work that would complicate other things and ultimately slow down the lookup code for an abstract advantage that means very little in the end.

But if this gets tossed there really is no need to convert incoming text to UTF-8 upon reading - in that case the internal data can be left as it is with only the text printing code having to deal with this.

Saying that non-ASCII lump names are not supported and anything involving them would be undefined behavior is probably the best route. I still think that Unicode support on file names is a different matter, because those can be passed via the command line - but for lumps in the resource management they only present a gigantic hassle.

[Graf Zahl]

I just merged the PR. The characters look fine, but obviously the BigUpper font still needed the small characters for lower case and all the rest of the regular BigFont to be complete.

Now on to filling in the rest of the Western European characters from 0xc0 - 0xff.

[Kostov]

I just merged the PR. The characters look fine, but obviously the BigUpper font still needed the small characters for lower case and all the rest of the regular BigFont to be complete.

What do you mean? Was something not in the right place in the PR, or missing?

[Graf Zahl]

The BigUpper font only contained the parts that are different from BigFont. To work it needed all characters copied over to the correct code points.

[Kostov]

OH, okay. Do you want me to make another pull request tomorrow?

[Graf Zahl]

No. I already copied everything over.

[Kostov]

There’s one gripe from previous versions that I haven’t mentioned earlier, and I don’t know whether the addition of Unicode has fixed it: player names written in Cyrillic don’t save after GZDoom is closed. Instead, the player name is blank when restarting the game.

[Graf Zahl]

That wouldn't really surprise me. Nearly everything regarding text input in the engine was written in s style totally oblivious to encoding schemes. Like typical American code assuming that ASCII is the rule. It somehow managed to work with 8-bit encodings, but with UTF-8 a lot of this code just falls apart. I can only fix thoese one piece at a time and each one will have to be done carefully.

Currently I am making the console UTF-8 proof, but that's not the last piece of stuff that needs work. Other places that need work is savegame name input, player name input and internal handling, chat text, menu controls where you can enter literal text, not to mention some of that Windows backend that is among the most awful code in the ZDoom code base because a lot of this code was written with zero abstraction to the Windows API.

[Kostov]

Glad to hear some progress is being made on that front! Where will all individual Unicode characters for the console be placed in the future? Will they be done the same way as the other fonts?

Also, there’s an error in the BigUpper fonts: the sprite offsets of the small caps letters aren’t set correctly. I’ve made a pull request that deals with this.

[Graf Zahl]

I'm not sure about the console yet. To be honest, I'd prefer to use system True Type fonts for that. The current font is way too small for today's displays, it was made when 640x480 was the most common screen size. However, if you have Cyrillic characters for that font, can you give me an image containing them?

[Kostov]

Certainly.



And here it is in its native .pcx format.

[TDRR]

Where in the source can i find the language file? I want to make a Spanish translation.

[Rachael]

It's in GZDoom.pk3, normally, but if you're going to do that please use the most up-to-date one, it's currently in the localization branch.

Download This file, and then rename it to "language.es" and you can work from there.

If there are any you are unsure of or that are incomplete, just remove the line so that it uses the English version.

[Enjay]

I'm not sure about the console yet. To be honest, I'd prefer to use system True Type fonts for that.

That would be an amazing improvement.

[Graf Zahl]

And here it is in its native .pcx format.

PNG is enough. I don't intend to run this through imagetool.

One question: I noticed that your fonts only cover the character range from 0x410-0x44f, but Cyrillic also uses 0x400-0x40f and 0x450-0x45f.
What languages are using these additional characters?