Will there be CJK characters support in FGU?

[davywsr]

TL;DR: Will there be Unicode support, or at least some support for CJK characters in FGU? I'm not asking about UI or rulesets translations, just allowing us typing in these languages is enough at the moment.



"Unicode support" was added to the feature request list in 2012, and have been in "under consideration" state for a long time.

I have searched this topic in the forum but found nearly nothing useful in those old posts. Most of the posts are ambiguous things like "possibly in the future", "not yet", "are considering". Even the kickstarter page has said nothing about "Unicode" or "non-English language support".

The only relevant post I find is this. But this "non-English languages" expressions... Well please allow me to divert this topic to another old post first.

I have found this post and tried his tutorial even though he has said that there might be some problems about Chinese and Japanese. And I did fail. Having looked at his ext list in signature, I deduce that his approach is more like some universal solutions to Indo-European languages rather than Unicode.

And judging from the fact that these languages' problems can be easily solved with merely an community-made extension and without a major charset change in the FG application itself, together with the previously mentioned post's words in the parentheses ("I'll stop short of saying Unicode. There are currently 136,000 characters in Unicode."), I highly doubt that the "non-English languages support" would be something like Indo-European languages since they are easier to implement, and most importantly, doesn't have as mach glyphs as CJK does.

I understand your developing team size is limited and don't mean to put pressure on you, but... Please understand me, as a Chinese TRPG gamer who really wants to share the convenience and joy of using FG with fellow players bad at English, I'm just worried about never be able to see this language support in practice.

As they have said in the feature request post, "Once you make this move to utf8, should be the last charset issue you (and us) will ever have". I feel like I cannot agree more, really hope that your developing team could kindly consider Unicode support, thank you very much.

[Moon Wizard]

The new platforms we’re using for FGU mostly support UTF8, but I’m unclear whether all the libraries we’re using will support UTF8. At this point, we do know for sure that the dynamic font generation engine we had to build (dynamic fonts not native to Unity) will not support multi-page character sets without a lot more coding.

Given the size of our team and our goal to release at end of year, providing full UTF8 support is out of scope at this time.

However, FGU is definitely closer than we were before, and we will most likely look at expanding the dynamic font system to support next year. It all depends on whether that is the only library that is needed. Also, I believe that most of the ruleset fonts are not UTF8 fonts; so a solution for generating visual characters when the specified font doesn’t support will be needed as well.

Regards,
JPG

[davywsr]

I understand it is not the main issue at this time and needs to be delayed, but thanks for the detailed description of the problem anyway. It's good to know you are not going to overlook it and are taking this issue seriously, that's enough to hear at the moment.

Besides, really looking forward to the FGU beta, can't wait to try out the new amazing features

[Valyar]

A lot of people I play with are also looking forward to the Cyrillic support. Both for the convenience of chatting on our own alphabet, but also to finally import a lot of content made for Roll20. Don't forget this, when you start prioritizing tasks. Many still play on Roll20 because of this.