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[Bezzy]

We're just about to implement our font/particle engine, so I'm looking for a program which you may have found useful for character map creation/editing. I'm looking for something which allows you to import fonts, then print them onto an arbitrarily sized texture, with arbitrarily sized grid blocks. I'm sure I've seen something like this before, but never had the inclination to grab it. I'm sort of hoping that by now, there are some pretty excellent tools for this sort of thing.

I'm also interested in whether you know of any which will handle japanese/chinese/korean characters nicely? I've heard that they're a bit of a pain to do because there are so many of them. Are there any sorts of well regarded standards we should stick to with these characters?

This is a longer term thing - we won't be doing localization for a fair while (you want to get all your text to a finalized state before you take on that).

[ravuya]

AngelCode has a bitmap font tool that might do what you want.

It handles unicode in the latest version, but dunno how well that works.

[Bezzy]

Thanks! I'm sure to check it out. Powernap time!

[Anthony Flack]

Actually I think Korean uses a nice simple alphabet; not too many characters. The other two: yes.

[Ste Pickford]

Are there any sorts of well regarded standards we should stick to with these characters?

http://unicode.org/

[Bezzy]

Ah, I meant more like... pixel width per character, number of characters per row. But thinking about it, I guess I just do whatever suits our game.

Unicode = yuss. Will do.

[Dan MacDonald]

The problem isn't so much the characters as it is the word length.  A simple phrase in English with a few short words can translate to several long words in German (a classic example).  If you plan to localize the best thing is to not cram you text areas too much as they may grow (or even shrink) depending on the language you are localizing in.

[Bezzy]

Yep! I remember that tip from localizers, and I'm keeping it in mind.

Good to have it here, though.

[ravuya]

I kinda wonder if it'd be possible to do an entire game in just icons.

Of course, you'd probably need to localize the icons for different cultures too.

[Bezzy]

We tried something like that once. It's doable, but it gets harder and harder to do the more complex your game play is.

[Anthony Flack]

If you plan to localize the best thing is to not cram you text areas too much as they may grow (or even shrink) depending on the language you are localizing in.

Although I'm yet to actually have to deal with this, I prepared for that eventuality  by adding some simple HTML-like formatting codes that my text-writing function can parse. So a translation file can include the codes to resize the text if it doesn't fit properly.

[Bezzy]

We're planning on creating a class extended from Tstring, which you initialize by pointing to an XML tag, and it loads in all the localized versions of that text, and when it's used in the form of a TCHAR* (i.e. any time we're sending it to be rendered), it returns the version of the currently selected language.

...Which sounds similar.

[Bezzy]

This one was closest to what I was looking for.

http://www.nitrogen.za.org/projectinfo.asp?id=12