Does VO client currently support cyrillic symbols in channel chat? I've tried to type something in Win1251 codepage but seems it doesn't work.
I clear realize that channel 102 (ru) is not populated enough for the moment. :)

I think not. Japanese characters, as well as umlauts, or otherwise accented characters are not displayed correctly.

I'd be in favour of supporting them, however.

Right.
I think VO is mostly US market oriented now. And other regions didn't put a significant value in Guild Softwrae budget. Therefore they can not spent time and money for multilang. feature. Maybe I am wrong. :)

It's not technically possible, given the way we handle fonts and the way we encode chat messages. We have discussed linking in FreeType and rendering arbitrary truetype fonts on the fly, which would allow us to support non-ASCII characters. It isn't something we have any experience in though; none of us speaks anything other than English.

Thanks for response!
I've just switched from EVE online and still keep comparing VO features against EVE. :)
Anyway VO is pretty nice for me. EVE is too complicated and time-consumed MMORPG.

Actually I would be surprised if the Europe (+UK) region wasn't a significant proportion of the Guild revenues.
However, to a large extent, this is a non issue for the British, French, Germans (umlauts: nice to have but not essential) and Italians. And I say this as someone who speaks the first 3 of those languages. And in Chat I drop les accents, in all clients / environments.
There are bigger and more pressing developments to work on.

like native GTS fonts! :-D (joking)

Doing french accents would be easy. It's mostly a matter of super-imposing two ASCII characters like ^ and e to become ê but even I, as a francophone, wonder about the utility of this given there are more pressing things to add to VO.

Cyrillic though is an entirely different ball game.

Not that I know how to do that, nor do I know how much work or how difficult it is, but wouldn't a proper switch to UTF-8 solve all these problems at once?

I dunno, being able to do ™'s and ©'s in VO might make the EULA look a little better, I mean, to have to use (TM)'s and (c)'s is like, sooooo last century, we have type-writers with delete keys now too ;)

piC, handling UTF8 is anything but trivial really.

UTF8 is a character encoding with variable length (unlike Unicode16 which is always 2 bytes), ranging from 1 to 6 bytes per character depending on code page.

Obviously, VO would only need to support a subset for latin alphabets (until they're asked to support japanese or other non-latin script systems) but even that gets messy and complicated fast.

They'd be better off removing their font and rendering with platform-specific APIs that do handle UTF8 or Unicode or Shift-JIS or anyone's favorite text torture system.

Until then, just pretend the world of VO is in some standardized galaxy script system which just happens to look like english and that you have a babel fish in the ear (or wherever it may suit you).

Sure, we can switch to UTF8 for encoding chat messages. That's the easy part to solve. We do our own font rendering (well, sort of), which is the part that's hard. We could use system libraries for it in Windows and OS X but on Linux we're on our own; so it'd be easiest to just use Freetype for everything, which means (I think) we have to do the UTF8 decoding ourselves.

And by the way, we do have *a lot* of non-US customers, as Eddy mentions, so it's not an issue we can ignore for too long. But that issue is sitting near the bottom of a large pile of other issues.

Just to make an effort to completely derail the topic...

What is at the very very bottom of the pile?

A garbage truck. It carries the pile around.

Well, it *was* turning the universe right-side up. I'm not sure how that actually got accomplished.

I dont know how to set a font here so i had to take a screen shot in notepad

wait, you mean the universe is right-side up now???

No. But the map has been flipped to make you believe everything's right, now.

Let me guess, you're talking about the socklikeness of the universe?