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General Discussion / Re: Will the 0.4 client support for all languages?
« on: August 11, 2013, 02:29:02 pm »To make support unicode require a maximum of one hour.
Oh really? What do you base this on? Do you even realise what is involved in supporting Unicode? Its not a simple case of doing doesSupportUnicode( true );
There are many reasons that Unicode isn't supported yet, one of which being it is a lot of work to simply get Unicode working in the chatbox. You mentioned that SA-MP supports it but they use a 3rd party UI so the hard part was done for them whereas vcmp and LU use their own UI. The way LU (and I assume vcmp) renders fonts is to render a huge bitmap of all the letters in the font, with extended ASCII this is 255 letters. To support Unicode it would be up to 65535 letters for each font. This would use a lot of both system and graphical memory which would be a problem for your average vcmp player as most people play with the very minimal system requirements.
Another thing to consider is that because Unicode characters are 2 bytes instead of 1, the netcode would have to be redone as it is coded around a character only using 1 byte. Plus Unicode would use double the bandwidth per message that comes through. Also remember that scripts are also in ASCII so they would have to be redone too to support the new character set.
Also remember that GTA itself doesn't even support Unicode so things like the big announce messages wouldn't work with Unicode.
Personally I don't see the need for Unicode. The chat already ends up as a complete mess with spam in English (or attempted English) so all adding Unicode would do is allow nabs to spam in more ways that nobody understands and use more bandwidth. Plus the majority of the players use English or languages that don't have their own characters which require Unicode (such as Spanish)