Greeting to the dev team of Spring,

We are Spring players from China and we like the game very much. Some of us and some other potential players, however, had some difficulty in this game because English is a foreign language to us. We hope that more people can enjoy this wonderful game more easily. So we'd like to make a suggestion and we really hope that it can be realized: We want to know if Spring engine supports UTF-8? If not, could you add that into the game engine?
And if we can have a localization system (like that in Spring Lobby) in the game engine after UTF-8 is supported, some of us can help to create localization profiles for other Chinese players that are not good at English. Furthermore, if there are players coming from other non-English-speaking countries and they also have this trouble, they will benefit from it too.



Best regards. One of the zealous Spring lovers in China.

what you want seems to be internationalization support, which is not the same like UTF-8 support. niether is likely gonna happen anything soon (or ever) though, sorry. even if you would volunteer to do it... we could most likely not accept it, cause for this, you need to change 1 out of 10 lines in the source code, which means that all branches are basically unusable after this, if they have a reasonable ammount of changes.
so.. the basic, technical work is not too complicated, but it would cause a lot of workflow problems, and it is very boring work.
that is my view, at least.

even if they added support for chinese characters into the engine, the games would still have all unit descriptions etc in English. All guides etc.

What games do you play on spring? Might be easier to work up a solution with the mod developer of the game you wish to play.

well id go with beherith, what mod/game you play the most?

i remember some translation effort being made for Zero-k.

Unit tags, names can be translated, to chinese.

the only thing that should never be translated, but only transcribed

well a flash would still be a flash, but description about energy costs/metal costs, and some ui things.

Maybe a custom UI that you could switch the language you see, per country. I mean you dont need to go into the Mod files to change all the lua into chinese. Maybe just tweek the ui to be more helpfull.

Before this gets another mono-endavour. Shouldnt we include support for arabic Letters? Just sayin... both are languages with quite diffrent syntax (right-left) and if somebody takes upon himself the difficulties to integrate chinese symbols into the source (or just the moddescription), he might consider this to avoid a second travell.

I'm not sure what's so special about arabic letters, unicode covers them just as well as any other used alphabet. As far as writing direction goes, I thought Chinese is much like Japanese where you can write top-to-bottom or left-to-right, where the latter is often chosen in digital media.
Lastly, unless you consider chat input (which may not even be an engine thing?) there may not be much need to worry about whether it's read left-to-right or right-to-left unless you consider text aligning which I'd assume would be a LuaUI thing and something to probably look at only after adding unicode support. Also, I'm sure we aren't the first one to think about using arabic script in games, could do a bit of research on what other people did by now.

Will it be a viable option to replace in-game characters with pictures that contain Chinese characters?

ZERO-K

LICHO! CUSTOMER!

You could maybe translate the UI using pictures instead of text. But the chat will not be compatible with unicode. What about pinyin?

Zero-K DOES HAVE internationalization support.

It had it for some years.

However .. lua does not support utf-8 so we cannot support chinnese fonts!

Thats the whole issue and it is engine issue.

wikified: http://springrts.com/wiki/Project_propo ... on_support

that could be maybe GSoC project. i hope my description describes the problem...

imo making some functions utf-8 compatible should solve most problems. i currently have no idea whats needed for that, but i guess typing utf-8 already works nicely, only the output is broken. (means functions like gl.Text needs to support utf8 characters, that should be https://github.com/spring/spring/blob/d ... .cpp#L1209 in the source of spring)

(edit: doh, its really similar to jk's "fontconfig support")

using pictures for chars is a really bad solution because it doesn't allow scaling, this would be just a workaround.

Spring wont even read utf-8 lua files..

and it has no support for utf8 strings in lua fields.

ZK has translations in unitdef files and we have to use ordinary charset.

utf-txt-files != utf string support
and it's not spring that fails at such files it is lua itself (still it has nothing to do with utf in strings)

Also only one file needs to be changed (glFont.cpp) everything in front of it should be utf8-aware, still dynamically loading of charsets is not trivial (a 2-4weeks project).

about pinyin?magine that, there is a game uses only phonetic transcriptions instead English words...

Nice that spring is played also in China, I would really like to have more non-anglosaxon players, and the Asian and Arabic ones are really missing. I hope we can do something to keep our customers happy.

I always found the lack of support for old German Letters quite disturbing. How is S44 ever complete without them.

When it comes for requests to massive Engine Changes, we all get the same.. a shovel and a Git-Repository.