Non-English Languages

[Sly]

I am working on the localised versions of my current project at the moment. Russian is an interesting language to implement on a Playstation 2.

[savage]

So PS2 supports Unicode or is all just rendered bitmaps for the Cyrillic character set?

[Imp5]

I am working on the localised versions of my current project at the moment. Russian is an interesting language to implement on a Playstation 2.

Sly, please, tell more about languages on a Playstation 2.
Are all of fonts texture-based?
How about Chinese and Japanese? As I know, Plastation developers don't like large textures.

[Sly]

We use font textures that contain only the characters that are required to show the text the game contains. So we do not have bitmaps for every Russian or Asian character. Internally, the game still uses 8-bit ASCII. This keeps memory usage down.

Languages such as English, French, Italian, German and Spanish (known in the industry as EFIGS since it is so common to support those languages) are easy because all their characters exist within the extended ASCII range (32-255). To show Russian or Asian languages that use Unicode, we insert special codes in the text that tells the font renderer to switch to a different font page. The text following the code is still in the standard ASCII range, but since we are using a different font, the images drawn on screen are of different characters.

For example, the text string for 'The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning' in Russian is

<P1>!"#$#%&' <P0>Spyro&#58; <P1>&#40;&#41;*&#41;' %#+#,&#41;

and shows on screen as

Сказание Spyro: Новое начало

The <P1> code tells the font renderer to switch to the second font texture. On this font texture, ! is С, " is к, and & is и.

To create this text with the proper codes, we have a tool that takes the translated text in a spreadsheet and converts it to 8-bit ASCII with the appropriate codes, based on the available fonts. If there are any characters in the translated text that we do not have an image for, it gives us a list of the missing characters, we add these to the font, and run the tool again.

I hope that made sense.

[Imp5]

I hope that made sense.

Yes, of course =)
Thanks!

[MeFDC]

And how about Esperanto?

P.S. Russian is my native language

[dmantione]

Well, it would be the ideal language were it not that very few people can speak it.

[WILL]

Only selfish people speak Esperanto.

"mmmmMi mi mi mi mi mi mi mi..."

[Lord_ZealoN]

Hey guys, I'm currious about something. Since PGD is an international site and we get members and visitors from around the world, there has to be a lot more people that speak another language than those that can just speak English.

So what are your OTHER languages?

(If I missed a major one, let me know! )

4 spanish votes ....uhmmm....

[rzcoder]

Russian:English 19:16
Ueahh!