Missing glyphs

[res7less]

Yet another thread that I hope not only affects the russian translation.

Currently the main menu font is missing two glyphs:

It was supposed to say "У тебя нет рекордов в этой таблице!"

So basically the big "У" (unicode number U+0423) and the small "ц" (unicode number U+0446) are missing. The second one is the same letter the lack of which is currently preventing me from using the correct translation for "Options" in the start menu.

 

[res7less]

With the new patch and menus, new glyphs are missing. The old ones are still missing too

The capital "И" (unicode number u+0418).


The capital "Х" in HP (unicode number u+0445). I could simply take the english X, but... well... consistency. I'll take it temporarily. Also, note that it's not missing in the other font where it's ХП.

 

[res7less]

Also, not sure where else to post this (not wanting to spam the update's thread with language-related stuff), but it appears in cyrillic different fonts are being used in the ingame menu. I'm not sure why this happens - either it's some of my old setting that were wrong all along or something new has been added. But that's what the ingame menu currently looks like:



The problem of the Options translation top left going over the borders is old and I have reported it at some point.

What's new is the middle section. First about, the difficulty is going over the border, which can't be a glyph problem as only the height is affected.
Furthermore, the HP bar settings, the damage numbers and the text speed headline use one font, while the difficulty headline uses another. In english all headlines use the second font, which also looks more crisp and more easily readable in russian.

So, yeah, there are some fine tuning necessary for the menus to look tidy.

Another thing happens in the same settings in the main menu. Here, the fonts are consistent, but due to the chunky font of the selection possibilities, for example the "on hit" translations is too wide. Unfortunately, I can't work around it as this is how it should be translated. Here's a screenshot:



The translation for "low HP" is also barely fitting in. It doesn't cover the left/right arrows, but it still looks awry.

 

[Teddy]

Thanks for reporting these! I'll investigate it later tonight or tomorrow! Will you update your translation despite it looking like that, or will you wait to see if I can fix stuff?

(I'm wondering because it's easier for me to fix things if I have the translation, but I get it if you don't want to release it when you're not happy with how it looks )

 

[res7less]

No problem, I'll release it and add a temporary note to the description

 

[The G-Meister]

Now even the Russian translation has a frontline version!

 

[Teddy]

@res7less

About the "?" there seems to be an override font in place for MainMenuTitle! I got very confused as to why my changes didn't matter for a while

Is this a remnant of something you tried before that didn't work? Or did it work, but you forgot to update the font?

 

[Teddy]

Looking at how bad the News Gothic font (the one used in English main menu) look in Cyrillic, I think that maybe I should just change the main menu Cyrillic font to be the same as the one used in game (Segoe)... that's basically what you've done yourself with the override font!

That way, you can just delete your custom font (go into the Font tabs of the translation suite, select MainMenuTitle and click delete spritefont) and use the "official" fonts again! This will also solve the new problems in the in game options menu, but not the good old "options in Russian is too long for the tiny box"-one. I'll probably need to bring out the GUI-scissors to make that one work!

As for the spacing issues in the main menu options, I'll make it so the arrows get nudged to the side if the translation is too wide!

 

[res7less]

Okay, now you reminded me how I got there. The reason why I, long ago, had changed settings for the MainMenuTitle font was because with the default settings (right after deleting the spritefont) it looks like this:




The borders aren't even the main problem, but the font itself just looks very chunky and unsatisfactory. What's interesting, though is that you said it's using News Gothic, but for me it shows the font Meiryo UI when I click the default button. Here:



All I did was not picking another font, but only setting the spacing to 0 and the font size to 11. I have also experimented with other settings but they all didn't look all that great.

Perhaps I should try typing in New Gothic manually and see what happens.

 

[res7less]

Hm, that didn't do anything at all. What's interesting though is that after deleting the spritefont and recompiling it with the settings I mentioned above, two of the four "?" I reported, are now shown with proper letters. The first two missing glyphs I reported, are still missing, though.

 

[Teddy]

Yes, what I mean is that the default font used by the main menu is News Gothic! The rest of the game uses Segoe.

Meiryo is the Asian version of Segoe - they are both free Microsoft fonts and are basically identical but Meiryo has much better support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. That's why it's default under the Font tab!

What you have experienced now is basically a glimpse of the extra hoops TsReaper has to go through when doing his Chinese translation

The font tools scan all the texts in the translation and create a unique sprite font with just the used glyphs, and nothing more. The reason being that the entire Chinese "alphabet" is tens of thousands of glyphs, which is impossible to compress into a single spritefont (spritefonts suck, but it's what XNA uses).

In other word, every time TsReaper uploads a new translation, he must recompile all the fonts to make sure they contain the necessary glyphs - or else all new glyphs will appear as "?".

As for Russian, since I agree that News Gothic looks like crap with Cyrillic for some reason, I'm proposing that I'll change the Cyrillic main menu font to Segoe (aka what you've done). When I've done so, you can delete the spritefont in your translation project, which will make your translation use the new in-game fonts!

 

[res7less]

News Gothic looks like crap with Cyrillic

I was trying to verbally go mild on the font, so thanks for making it easier for both of us with that crystal clear description

The font tools scan all the texts in the translation and create a unique sprite font with just the used glyphs, and nothing more.

Ah, I see. Hm, but why doesn't the script consider the first two glyphs as being used even after recompilation?

When I've done so, you can delete the spritefont in your translation project, which will make your translation use the new in-game fonts!

Great! Let me know when you do.

 

[res7less]

*sighs* Looks like it's not that easy. To test Segoe I compiled by manually typing Segoe UI in and it's only a minor improvement.

First about, there seems to be a problem with the spacing. When leaving the spacing at 1 it looks like this:



The same problem was with News Gothic, if leaving the spacing at 1.

With spacing set to 0 (default font size of 12) the main menu looks great, but... the two glyphs are still missing. Also, the ingame menu looks even worse than before for some reason. The last word is even farther down the border because the spaces between the setting headlines and the settings themselves are bigger and make everything look as if there is no structure at all and words are strewn haphazardly under one another:



Edit: The ingame menu looks good when the spritefont is deleted, though. The main menu doesn't, however.

 

[Teddy]

Don't panic and remain calm! It's the custom fonts playing tricks on you, probably. The glyphs you're mentioning are missing because they most likely belong to another custom font category which has not been built.

Sit back and relax! Segoe is the saviour Russia needs; trust me. Or just trust these totally not doctored images!

 

[Teddy]

To reiterate the plan: I'll try to fix the issues with the options menu texts overlapping stuff tonight or tomorrow, and update the game (along with some other non-translation fixes)!

I'll be sure to ping you in the patch post, and then you can just remove the custom font from your translation. The game will use the new Cyrillic fonts in Segoe, which will include all the Russian glyphs (as seen in the screenshots)!

 

[res7less]

Zis be understood, comrade.

 

[res7less]

It looks so much better and tidier now! Thank you, Teddy!


Edit: I tested it in both versions now and frontline looks really great with the deleted spritefont. If we want stable to be prioritized, though, should I again use the compiled size 11, spacing 0 font until you merge the two? Also, the ingame menu in stable doesn't look that great with the compiled font, but not catastrophic either.

 

[Teddy]

If we want stable to be prioritized, though, should I again use the compiled size 11, spacing 0 font until you merge the two? Also, the ingame menu in stable doesn't look that great with the compiled font, but not catastrophic either.

Yeah, this is probably the best solution!