Improved text-encoding in-game?

[StevieC]

I find myself somewhat frustrated that I can't use ASCII characters, such as the basic accented letters (À/à, Á/á, Â/â, Ã/ã, Ä/ä, Å/å, Æ/æ, Ç/ç, È/è, É/é, Ê/ê, Ë/ë, Ì/ì, Í/í, Î/î, Ï/ï, Ñ/ñ, Ò/ò, Ó/ó, Ô/ô, Õ/õ, Ö/ö, Ø/ø, Œ/œ, Ù/ù, Ú/ú, Û/û, Ü/ü, ß are the ones most reliably compatible across all 3 major OS platforms, I think)

It'd be nice to be able to actually name a spacecraft "Mün Lander" or have a kerbonaut named "Jürgen Kerman" or "Zoë Kerman", for example.

Would Unity 5 allow for this in KSP v1.1 or one of the later revisions of 1.1, at all?

This issue is not a new one, it was reported as far back as v0.19, as these three bug reports show.

It'd be nice if Unicode could also be implemented, as Unity 5 does support it, and I know that full UTF-16 is unlikely anytime soon, but simple UTF-8 would make a huge difference by letting us use accented letters and such in naming our spacecraft and our Kerbonauts.

Edited March 24, 2016 by StevieC
Following suggestions from a fellow user to reformat my starting post for clarity

[Snark]

This seems like a reasonable thing to want, especially for a game that sells around the world.  If the game doesn't handle that, I'd call that a bug rather than a missing feature.

Have you reported it?

[StevieC]

I figured requesting full Unicode support would be too much to ask.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, StevieC said:

I figured requesting full Unicode support would be too much to ask.

I could be wrong, but I believe that Unity 5 does have it pretty close to that.  Don't take my word for it though.

Edit:

Yes it does:

Unity has full unicode support. Unicode text allows you to display German, French, Danish or Japanese characters that are usually not supported in an ASCII character set. You can also enter a lot of different special purpose characters like arrow signs or the option key sign, if your font supports it.

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-Font.html

Edited March 20, 2016 by Guest

[Snark]

24 minutes ago, StevieC said:

I figured requesting full Unicode support would be too much to ask.

There's never any problem with asking for it.    They may or may not fix it, depending on lots of factors, including 1. how hard it would be to fix, 2. how much it impacts game play, 3. how many people are affected, 4. time available (given other features and bug fixes that need doing), and so forth.

But they can't fix what they haven't heard about.  I don't work for Squad and therefore can't speak for them, but I've been a professional software engineer for a very long time, and I can tell you, I love it when someone reports a bug in my code, since that's how I can make my stuff better!

So by all means, file a bug report!  The worst that can happen is that they defer or won't-fix it.

[StevieC]

Seems it was reported back in v0.24 and is labeled as "low priority". Should I still submit a new bug report?

[Snark]

 

13 minutes ago, StevieC said:

Seems it was reported back in v0.24 and is labeled as "low priority". Should I still submit a new bug report?

So am I correct in reading this as meaning that you actually went and looked for an existing bug before logging your own? If so: my hat is off to you, sir. Thank you for your diligence, duplicate bugs are a pain and you make developers' lives easier this way.

Don't assume that just because it's marked as "low" priority that Squad doesn't care. "Low" is the default setting for new bugs, and you don't know what labeling convention they're using.

Before I try to give any more specific suggestions, though... could you post a link to the existing bug?

[StevieC]

There's a few.

Non-ASCII characters only partially supported

Unable to map non-English keys

Accented characters on the UI

I hope this is satisfactory for your request that I link the bug(s)

[Snark]

19 hours ago, StevieC said:

There's a few.

Non-ASCII characters only partially supported

Unable to map non-English keys

Accented characters on the UI

Thanks, that's helpful!

The best bet for bugs to get fixed is visibility and demand.  I don't actually know Squad's reasons for not fixing these issues when they've been known about for so long, but if I had to guess, my bet would be that it's probably something along the general lines of "there's not much demand for it, and there's greater demand for other stuff, so we'll put it on the back burner."

(Purely my speculation, I have no special insight into their bug triage process.)

So the best thing you can do is to provide visibility to Squad that "users care about this feature" ... which is exactly what this Suggestions forum is for.    Posting here isn't just shouting down a hole-- the devs do come and look at what's in here.

You've already taken the first step, which is to post this thread.  The next step, I'd suggest, would be to arrange it for ease of visibility.  I would suggest taking those three bugs you just linked and editing your original post above to tack them on there, i.e. at the end of your OP, put something like "This issue has been around for a while.  Here are some bugs that involve the issue, I'd love to see this fixed!"  and then the links.

And then at that point it's a matter of seeing how much the user community cares about it, really.  If enough people seem to want it, I expect it'll get Squad's attention.

[StevieC]

and, edited!