29 replies to this topic

[myojine]

the game im making currently is made with japanese based erm im not exactly sure whatto call ti.. But the Game has alot of japanese stuff in it, So im going to make a japanese version of the game... Well if theres Japanese Text Suport availbe for GM.
So Does GM support Japanes characters?(only as texted language. Or would i have to get an exention of sorts. If so how would i implement the japanese text into the game?
ID hope to have it as easy as just translating the text and altering the graphics from english to japanese...

[Recreate]

I don't see why not, why don't you try it?

[hpapillon]

I don't see why not

... because you never thought about it?

If you poke around in the extending forum, there's been a lot of discussion of people trying to figure out ways to get unicode or asian characters in text to work. Last I checked, there's still no solution.

I do know at least one person who claimed to have made it work via the "upload graphics for every character" angle. The problem is that that's a LOT of graphics... there are an awful lot of characters in Japanese! I did it myself for Russian once, but their character set is much smaller and could be implemented as a custom font. You can't do that with Japanese. You'd need to design a whole set of code to draw images manually.

[myojine]

I don't see why not

... because you never thought about it?

If you poke around in the extending forum, there's been a lot of discussion of people trying to figure out ways to get unicode or asian characters in text to work. Last I checked, there's still no solution.

I do know at least one person who claimed to have made it work via the "upload graphics for every character" angle. The problem is that that's a LOT of graphics... there are an awful lot of characters in Japanese! I did it myself for Russian once, but their character set is much smaller and could be implemented as a custom font. You can't do that with Japanese. You'd need to design a whole set of code to draw images manually.

What about loading a font that has japanese characters in it erm, i mean like i paste japanese text and the game shows that text? is that possilbe?

for example
English version: Having a good day?
Japanese Version: は元気ですかOを?
*(o no genki desu ka)

[epicCreations]

I don't see why not

... because you never thought about it?

If you poke around in the extending forum, there's been a lot of discussion of people trying to figure out ways to get unicode or asian characters in text to work. Last I checked, there's still no solution.

I do know at least one person who claimed to have made it work via the "upload graphics for every character" angle. The problem is that that's a LOT of graphics... there are an awful lot of characters in Japanese! I did it myself for Russian once, but their character set is much smaller and could be implemented as a custom font. You can't do that with Japanese. You'd need to design a whole set of code to draw images manually.

What about loading a font that has japanese characters in it erm, i mean like i paste japanese text and the game shows that text? is that possilbe?

for example
English version: Having a good day?
Japanese Version: は元気ですかOを?
*(o no genki desu ka)

What? It was just explained that Unicode and Asian characters aren't supported. You cannot just paste it into the editor, if that's what you are asking.
If you really wanted it, basically, it would play out like this:
1-You make a sprite font with each ASCII code standing for a character, probably supporting Hiragana and Katakana, perhaps Kanji if there were enough open characters but I doubt it.
2-You type out the codes or characters representing in the string, for example if hiragana ge was 65 (A), hiragana n was 66 (, and hiragana ki was 67 © then in the string you would put "ABC" and it would show as "げんき" .
3-???
4-Profit!

Keep in mind this solution does not just allow you to type in romaji.

P.S. You could always just type the Japanese into images and use those (although that's really resource heavy)
P.P.S. You formatted the Japanese wrong (what is that ha/wa doing in the front, along with the Oを at the end?)

Edited by epicCreations, 06 October 2010 - 05:45 AM.

[dadio]

Actually this is something I'd really love to see in a future version of GM.
Someone should get on to Mike about it.
Unicode/Asian character support would be very handy for making titles multilingual & porting for sale to the likes of Japan...
indeed, Unicode support is more important/potentially useful now with the iPhone porting & fact that iPhone is doing well in Japan - could be a real nice market to tap.

As hpapillon pointed out, Russian is "doable" because it has a reasonable character set...
but Japanese & Chinese are not - because of the amount of Kanji characters...
(2000-3000 Kanji characters are in common use in Japan.)

Imo, your best bet would be
1) create your game in English...
2) get a Japanese person to translate into Japanese...
3) use single "pics" of complete paragraphs of the Japanese text in-game rather than an actual font set.

If you try to avoid using kanji all together your game will read very stupidly... like a very young kids book.

The way that some games would do it would be to have full font sets for hiragana & katakana & then see what kanji are actually used in the game script & only include those that are needed as special characters... (unless your game has a ton of text, the number of kanji used could be quite small - very likely under 100, possibly under 50)... alotta time/effort required for this solution tho.

(Also worth noting that PC isn't very popular at all as a games platform in Japan/for Japanese...
& that Japan already has *plenty* of "titillating" game titles...
so you're probably wasting your time with a Japanese version anyway.)

Edited by dadio, 06 October 2010 - 06:25 AM.

[myojine]

Actually this is something I'd really love to see in a future version of GM.
Someone should get on to Mike about it.
Unicode/Asian character support would be very handy for making titles multilingual & porting for sale to the likes of Japan...
indeed, Unicode support is more important/potentially useful now with the iPhone porting & fact that iPhone is doing well in Japan - could be a real nice market to tap.

As hpapillon pointed out, Russian is "doable" because it has a reasonable character set...
but Japanese & Chinese are not - because of the amount of Kanji characters...
(2000-3000 Kanji characters are in common use in Japan.)

Imo, your best bet would be
1) create your game in English...
2) get a Japanese person to translate into Japanese...
3) use single "pics" of complete paragraphs of the Japanese text in-game rather than an actual font set.

If you try to avoid using kanji all together your game will read very stupidly... like a very young kids book.

The way that some games would do it would be to have full font sets for hiragana & katakana & then see what kanji are actually used in the game script & only include those that are needed as special characters... (unless your game has a ton of text, the number of kanji used could be quite small - very likely under 100, possibly under 50)... alotta time/effort required for this solution tho.

(Also worth noting that PC isn't very popular at all as a games platform in Japan/for Japanese...
& that Japan already has *plenty* of "titillating" game titles...
so you're probably wasting your time with a Japanese version anyway.)

There is the so called 1800 Daily use Kanji, and some 360+Katakana and Mirroring hirigana character sets. Anything in japanese can be writin in kana or hiri so kanji would be completely unessiary(think of it like... The Ampersand(&) symbol and the Word And, the Ampersand would be like Kanji, and the word And would be like writing it in katakana)

This kinda solves my question, i guess my game wont be translateble without serious amounts of work.

[Smarty]

There is the so called 1800 Daily use Kanji, and some 360+Katakana and Mirroring hirigana character sets. Anything in japanese can be writin in kana or hiri so kanji would be completely unessiary

Although it is technically possible to write Japanese solely in Hiragana and Katakana, as I understand it the Japanese themselves have largely two associations with language that uses only those two character sets. They're used either to indicate a heavy foreign accent or to represent children's talk. In other words, you may get away with it once or twice for comic relief, but it would be tiresome if you maintain that style all the way.

If you don't understand the problem: it is muts la-ik ryting out yu-ur lengwits foneticalee.

Edited by Smarty, 06 October 2010 - 10:34 AM.

[2Dcube]

I've been wanting this for quite some time! Not just for games but also little programs. I have some ideas for a study tool (to learn Japanese) but can't make it in Game Maker.

Actually this is something I'd really love to see in a future version of GM.
Someone should get on to Mike about it.

I will!

[epicCreations]

I've been wanting this for quite some time! Not just for games but also little programs. I have some ideas for a study tool (to learn Japanese) but can't make it in Game Maker.

Actually this is something I'd really love to see in a future version of GM.
Someone should get on to Mike about it.

I will!

*high-fives*

[chance]

This doesn't seem like something that helps many users. I'm not saying its a bad thing, just that it doesn't seem that useful to lots of users.

I hope YoYo games prioritises there upgrades to help the most users. This should be low on the list.

[Smarty]

This doesn't seem like something that helps many users. I'm not saying its a bad thing, just that it doesn't seem that useful to lots of users.

Not useful to a lot of users? There are 127 million people living in video game country Japan!

It's not just support for Japanese we need, but support for Unicode. This would open the door to character sets in any language. You're basically ruling out pretty much all of Asia by saying it shouldn't be a priority.

Edited by Smarty, 06 October 2010 - 10:42 PM.

[dadio]

Exactly.
This also reminds me of something I thought of a long while ago...
I'm guessing that Mark using Delphi was the reason for no Unicode support...
but I'm wondering if multilingual versions *of GameMaker itself* is something that YoYo have given thought to?

I've always felt that a Japanese language version of GameMaker in particular would be a huge hit. The "game hack" community in Japan (pumping out original SMW levels & heavily modding old NES games etc.) is pretty active... & games in general are *mega-popular* there...
but most Japanese don't have a very good grasp of English, so GM would be out of reach.
I think that a Japanese GM would go down a real treat in Japan (& that we'd see some truly stunning games...)

High population, very low piracy rate, probably highest game interest in the world - seems to me that it would be a good move by YoYo to tap into this (potentially massive) market.

(I realize there's more to it than "Woohoo! Let's do it!" - GML is English based & would still offer a hurdle to potential Japanese devvers... & there would be expenses invloved in general support for a Japanese version - but still, something worth thinking about.)

[thatshelby]

Plus one to this whole danged topic. It's a great idea, it must be supported. I could write some translating scripts.

[halo7568]

Exactly.
This also reminds me of something I thought of a long while ago...
I'm guessing that Mark using Delphi was the reason for no Unicode support...
but I'm wondering if multilingual versions *of GameMaker itself* is something that YoYo have given thought to?

I've always felt that a Japanese language version of GameMaker in particular would be a huge hit. The "game hack" community in Japan (pumping out original SMW levels & heavily modding old NES games etc.) is pretty active... & games in general are *mega-popular* there...
but most Japanese don't have a very good grasp of English, so GM would be out of reach.
I think that a Japanese GM would go down a real treat in Japan (& that we'd see some truly stunning games...)

High population, very low piracy rate, probably highest game interest in the world - seems to me that it would be a good move by YoYo to tap into this (potentially massive) market.

(I realize there's more to it than "Woohoo! Let's do it!" - GML is English based & would still offer a hurdle to potential Japanese devvers... & there would be expenses invloved in general support for a Japanese version - but still, something worth thinking about.)

Foreign languages (such as Japanese) apparently were possible in older versions of Game Maker, actually. From the look of it, saving a game maker source file and creating an executable properly required having the right character encoding in effect on Game Maker. Then running the executable resulted in the language being displayed properly (provided the right character encoding was in effect). I know in GM 4.3 I was able to display Japanese characters at least.

Not sure what changed since then, but I know foreign character sets are not supported as early as GM 7.

It might be possible to bypass the issue somewhat trivially by editing the executable, though I am not familiar with Game Maker enough to say much. This solution as I am thinking of it, if it did work, would limit you to a specific code page since Game Maker apparently does not support Unicode.

Edited by halo7568, 07 October 2010 - 04:14 AM.

[Razon]

In GM6-7 there was support for Japanese characters in the script editor only, and there was a program from the Japanese community that could generate a font sprite set for the characters- and scripts that could handle drawing them. I haven't tested them since so unsure if it still works, I know that unicode support was removed from the script editor as of GM8.

Nonetheless, here's a link to where you can get it from: http://gamemaker.jpn...ticle.php?id=23

[GearGOD]

I wouldn't bank a lot of money on GM supporting this.

Some technical background: currently GM uses the 'sprite font' approach, basically all the characters you want to print are pre-rendered to a texture, textured polygons are then used to place the characters.
The problem is that for a meaningfully large character set, the texture size gets stupidly high. You could never render unicode this way.

There are numerous other ways of drawing text. The choices for use in GM are limited by the fact its a realtime 3d rendering system and software based approaches like used in the text control that you're reading this off, won't really work.

There are also hardware-based approaches, I've spent some time to implement one myself. I see two obstacles to overcome before they're seen in gm: firstly none of them will will work on dx8, we're looking at least at dx9 with SM3 support. Secondly, these are pretty complex beasts, especially if you actually want to render unicode and not just unicode characters. From the growth of GM I've seen since version 4, I'd say its beyond the technical ability of the developers unless they blow a significant chunk of time and budget to do it. As its a want and not a need, they probably won't even think about it in the near future.

[Smarty]

Some technical background: currently GM uses the 'sprite font' approach, basically all the characters you want to print are pre-rendered to a texture, textured polygons are then used to place the characters.

The problem is that for a meaningfully large character set, the texture size gets stupidly high. You could never render unicode this way.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the shortcut obvious? Rather than pre-rendering the entire character set to a texture, it should render the required characters directly from the installed or provided font at runtime.

It's not the only change in implementation they face - Unicode also needs to be supported for the dialog boxes, the file functions and for the code editor within Game Maker itself. That doesn't sound as too big a change to make however, since such functionality is supported by the underlying operating systems.

I speak for Windows and Apple OSes only here - I don't know how Unicode is dealt with on mobile devices such as the recently targeted PSP, if at all.

[GearGOD]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the shortcut obvious? Rather than pre-rendering the entire character set to a texture, it should render the required characters directly from the installed or provided font at runtime.

I don't understand what you mean. Render only a subset of characters to texture? That's what is currently being done. The constraint on using textures for fonts isn't disk space, its video memory and texture size limitations. There's only so many characters you can stick into a 1024x1024 texture, which is the biggest size I'd try to use on dx8 class hardware. You just can't stick japanese, chinese, korean, etc into this size.

I mean, its certainly doable to render subsets of a complete character set to a bunch of textures and then switch between them, but I don't think I've ever seen it done or would do that myself given the same problem. At that point it becomes more of a hack than a solution and it still consumes a buttload of vram. And yeah, before any of that happens, the entire thing needs to be compiled with unicode support - editor and runner both.

[Smarty]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the shortcut obvious? Rather than pre-rendering the entire character set to a texture, it should render the required characters directly from the installed or provided font at runtime.

I don't understand what you mean. Render only a subset of characters to texture? That's what is currently being done.

No, what I understood from you is that the entire font is stored in a texture so that it contains all characters, and then in-game it is blitted from that character set texture to a texture that displays the actual text. Why not skip the pre-rendered full-font texture and draw directly on a texture using the original font?

Performance reasons, maybe, or the ability to ensure the font travels with the game. But it's not really a feasible solution with character sets that go beyond the ASCII limit.