What about more languages/translations?

[esteel]

Well people play quake for 10 years and non-unicode was never a problem.. why create one? Yes it might be nice but i think its not needed.

[kneekoo]

Who am I to argue such a thing? You're right, of course. People have been playing Quake the last decade and having English all-over it didn't keep them out. Being translated, though, might boost the project's popularity so that's another strong argument to consider.

I won't say games have auto-programming or auto-evolution mode. There's human effort in every new feature and we're already enjoying the current outcome. We are grateful for that. You did that for us. Now making it multi-language might make it more rewarding for you, because new people can join. Translators will be ready when you are. Until then, keep up the good work.

[esteel]

Who am I to argue such a thing? You're right, of course. People have been playing Quake the last decade and having English all-over it didn't keep them out. Being translated, though, might boost the project's popularity so that's another strong argument to consider.

Hehe what i meant was that the way the engine and its font system work are not prepared for unicode.. all they do so far are at max 256 characters and i'm not sure how easy it would be to change this. For knowing that i think divVerents idea to just replace some of the now used glyphs with common european characters is the most promising idea and is also rather easy compared with huge rewrites of internal stuff. I have little clue about the engine itself so maybe its easier then one thinks but from what i learned while programming thats a thing that has not happend to any programmer yet

[divVerent]

However, Darkplaces DOES need a better font renderer. Currently it takes an image and divides it into 16 rows/columns of characters, just like Quake did. This also means that fonts are necessarily fixed width.

If there is some way to get a TTF renderer in, why not - but the problem is that:

• the main engine developer lives in the US, and TTF's hinting is covered by software patents
• TTF renderers are quite large and not exactly portable
• Internals of the engine rely on fixed width character cells (well, in Nexuiz the chat area feature also brought some readiness for variable width character sets; but we don't have a format for such fonts we can use, and stuff like centerprint still wouldn't work with that)

And no, one cannot rely on the user environment's font renderer (Windows' Truetype or X.org's Freetype) in OpenGL applications.

Another problem: games need to take full control of the keyboard (in X11 language, they "grab" the keyboard) so for example accidentally pressing the Windows key doesn't minimize the game and open the start menu. However, when that is done, shortcuts to switch keyboard layouts don't work either. So on a Russian keyboard, one then can't switch between Cyrillic and Latin characters. What also is impossible under these circumstances are input method editors like used for Asian languages which have LOTS of characters. However, if there's demand, we can code specific support for Russian keyboard layout.

What may come is variable width font support at least for chat and info messages.

[kneekoo]

So TTF is not a choice as well as fixed type characters are. But how about SVG? It's scalable, open standard and we could create nice graphical fonts with open source software to have every message displayed as needed.

What do you think of this one?

[leileilol]

Wudan got freetype working in q3 once, and getting things to work in Q3 is hard.

One of the main advantages of using freetype (and such) is the east asian language support.