ID:100087
 
Applies to:Website
Status: Open

Issue hasn't been assigned a status value.
Duplicates:id:108199
Given BYOND's need to constantly expand its userbase, it would be nice to have support for Chinese and Japanese characters.

I've had a simple tagline on my personal blog for about five years -- just in case you put in UTF-8 support for the members pages. With the number of Japanese Anime fan games on the site, those game owners would benefit greatly by having a launch page catered towards Asia-based users.

(BTW, something's batty with Google Analytics and www.byond.com -- wanted to add some international stats, but to no avail.)
Retried putting my "Hello! Have a nice day." phrase for my blog title, and have a brand new mangling.

There appears to be Chinese character support for blog text (i.e. 你好。有一好天!), but apparently not for other spots.
I doubt any of the developers know Japanese. A welcome page in a foreign language wouldn't be much good if none of the games were
Falacy wrote:
I doubt any of the developers know Japanese. A welcome page in a foreign language wouldn't be much good if none of the games were

Agreed. But that misses the point entirely.

The motivation is two-fold:
1) Let's say a certain developer has a game that is based off of a popular anime/manga series. This game is a source of revenue for this developer. Let's say this developer is looking to expand his/her total available market. Knowing that the 2nd and 3rd largest economies, and 1st and 2nd largest consumers of anime product, it would be highly beneficial to craft and steer the marketing and development efforts along those lines.

2) The inherent _lack_ of said support shuts out that market entirely. BYOND understands that a large proportion of their revenue and viewership is derived from their core anime base. They fully understand market conditions and the need to expand their user base. There currently are efforts to expand beyond the Anime genre -- again, this is in the effort of expanding their market presence.
Falacy wrote:
I doubt any of the developers know Japanese. A welcome page in a foreign language wouldn't be much good if none of the games were

I know Japanese.
I'm definitely in support of this.
I'm constantly getting players who are using languages that are just displayed as question marks.
I would imagine that'd be super frustrating for them.
I support this. I don't play anime games, or make anime games, but I'm sure it would help all of those who do.
I think that compatibility should be added for non-latin alphabets (Japanese, Korean, Russian etc). See, when BYOND is run through Applocale, non-latin fonts work fine but with a handful of glitches which are a pain in the ass. I think the compatibility should be built in across the board.

If people don't want non-latin text in their games, then add a simple function that prevents it from rendering when set to true, making it the usual ?s instead of 青, everyone wins and nobody can bitch.
In response to Winter Tail
+ (?)
In response to Winter Tail
I'm pretty sure this isn't as easy as it sounds.
In response to Winter Tail
In response to Winter Tail
I believe this would only be possible if Dream Seeker supported Unicode...which it does not.
Falacy wrote:
I doubt any of the developers know Japanese. A welcome page in a foreign language wouldn't be much good if none of the games were

Far more uses for Unicode than that.

Bootyboy wrote:
Retried putting my "Hello! Have a nice day." phrase for my blog title, and have a brand new mangling.

There appears to be Chinese character support for blog text (i.e. 你好。有一好天!), but apparently not for other spots.

Indeed, BYOND doesn't support IPA characters either, which has annoyed me. Of course, given I'm one of maybe two linguists on BYOND this isn't very relevant, but still.
I know you know already, but I'm going to attach my request to try have it marked as a duplicate or at least merge it with yours (which came first). :P

http://www.byond.com/members/ BYONDHelp?command=view_tracker_issue&tracker_issue=2701
I support this. It would be a great thing.
I support this, because ANSI char 255 is pain in ass to replace as 'ÿ' (and in some places it even must be 'я', totally messes me up) in right places and not replace in some others, and it tends to eat up next letter of text and use it as coloring directive... or i need some way to change codepage from ANSI to OEM, it had cyrillics on lower charcodes...
Giving this a bit of a bump due to this recent thread in Developer Help. I was also reading a past discussion and was wondering if this would be easier to implement in the builds compiled under VS2013? Or even perhaps have this added to the webclient?
With the webclient coming out, I would say UTF-8/UTF-16 should be more feasible than ever. Of course one step that is still required is making DMB handle UTF-16 support. Fortunately, the DMB format seems to be rather flexible in the fact you could add something to ensure compatibility with ANSI/UTF-8 and UTF-16. When a DMB file is in UTF-16 mode, strings will change from 1-byte to 2-byte and double the size of the DMB file as needed.
Change windows-1252 ---> utf-8.
In response to Doniu
This is not a trivial request (nor a new one; there's an existing topic for this already). Some things support UTF-8 internally, but others don't.
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