Using foreign language (Korean)

[ShinjinNakamura]

I'm currently translating my game from English to Korean. However I can't add Korean text in the game script files, they end up appearing as question marks as well as in the rendered game.

How do I go about this?

[Crimson Wizard]

Here's the good article about fonts: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Fonts

Also, you should know that AGS does not support Unicode characters, only 128- and 256- character sets. If there exists a Korean 256-character set - you may try using that, otherwise it's not doable, except for ugly workarounds, like make a font that has korean characters in place of Latin etc characters, then converting Korean text into "pseudo-Korean" with different character codes (numbers < 256).

[ShinjinNakamura]

Good idea, I'll have to use a program to make a custom font set. Hopefully it will work.

[ShinjinNakamura]

So that idea didn't really work out well.

So what I'm doing now is using images instead of text for dialogue. This works fine but since I can't use SetSkipSpeech by click, any idea on how to accomplish this with images?

[Crimson Wizard]

So what I'm doing now is using images instead of text for dialogue. This works fine but since I can't use SetSkipSpeech by click, any idea on how to accomplish this with images?

That's not a good idea, you might get a lot of problems because of this, not just with "skip speech", and might end writing custom speech system.
What exactly was a problem with custom font?

[ShinjinNakamura]

That's not a good idea, you might get a lot of problems because of this, not just with "skip speech", and might end writing custom speech system.
What exactly was a problem with custom font?

Well basically Korean fonts have 2000+ characters (because each character is combined with others to form new characters e.g http://cl.ly/image/1b0r2g1M1q0C) so that's kind of impossible to bring down to 256 without losing a majority of necessary characters. :\

[Mandle]

That's not a good idea, you might get a lot of problems because of this, not just with "skip speech", and might end writing custom speech system.
What exactly was a problem with custom font?

Well basically Korean fonts have 2000+ characters (because each character is combined with others to form new characters e.g http://cl.ly/image/1b0r2g1M1q0C) so that's kind of impossible to bring down to 256 without losing a majority of necessary characters. :\

Yeah...I think using images is the only way in AGS to use Korean and also Japanese...

Well...

With Japanese the old-school method of putting everything in Hiragana/Katakana could work...But I doubt many Japanese players would appreciate this as it is difficult to read without the context of the Kanji characters needed to fully define the meaning of the text.

I don't know if there is a similar defined set of phonetic characters in Korean, but the same problem probably applies if there is.

So: Images of the text would be the work-around...But this is going to require a LOT of coding especially if dialogues are important in the game. I'd image you can still use the in-built Dialogue tool built into AGS, but that everything will have to be indented (to be recognized as code) to display the image-based text instead of just printing it out as a normal font.

Someone please correct me where I'm almost certainly wrong

[Scavenger]

There's Linear Hangul ( ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ ), but that was only used in the early 20th century, and wasn't very popular.

It would be possible to change the text rendering system - though even that I'm pretty worried about - Korean has nine different ways of constructing a syllable block. Looking at a placement chart, there are 19 initial (with 6 configurations), 21 medial (with 8 configurations), and 27 final (with 2 configurations) glyphs. Adding them together, you'd need at least 336 seperate glyphs to construct every Korean syllable block (I'm sure there's some overlap that can be taken advantage of to cut down the total number - such as combining ã…‡ [no sound initial] and ã…‡ [p final], or á„â,¬ [ng initial] and ㄱ [k final]). A tricky thing, to be sure, but it looks possible?