what if players/guilds could pay credits to have their own signs appear outside of stations? For example, a guild may want to buy a few signs in their territory to help recruit new players, or a team may use them to advertise events or instill support for a cause, or even a player (Deneb Racer?).

I don't know what kind of screening would be involved or if it would be feasable, but it's an idea...

That would be AWESOME! Every station in grey would have signs declaring my greatness to the world.

The devs would have to make a real GTS font first, AFAIK. Currently, the signs are bitmaps, but the engine -can- draw text with freetype. But it'd have to be GTS. Having English on signs would be lame.

Rogue: I agree...

I really don't see why a font would be necessary though - signs could be assembled from a matrix of bitmaps.

The problem with GTS is that it's not very well thought through.

It's a written language that uses an alphabet and a logographs (consisting of pictograms and ideograms), and while I see no problems with the alphabet (other than different consonants, etc), there are issues with the pictographs, namely that there aren't enough of them to really create a rich vocabulary.

Of all the languages in the world that use a hybrid alphabetic(or syllabic)/logographic writing system, probably the most famous would be Japanese, which combines 46 syllabic characters (kana - in this case, hiragana) with over 6000 Chinese (or Chinese derived) characters (although only about 2000 of which are required to be able to read most newspapers and magazines without problems).

GTS only has 49 logographic characters, and are fairly limited in terms of the ideas that they can convey. While you can fairly easily create ship and combat related signs like, "SANDAR - First in Ship Repairs" (from the vo wiki), what if you wanted to say, "XANG XI - Bringing Entry Level Air Fresheners to Beginner Pilots For Over 50 Years!" First of all, there's no "X" character in GTS, and the only pictograph you could use is the Pilot Pictograph. Heck, even saying something more normal like, "XANG XI - Selling High Quality Positron Blasters" would be sort of a hack job. The best you could do is "ZANG ZI - Here Good POSITRON Weapon"

I doubt that Guild would want to spend the time creatin an entire pictographic language out of GTS when they clearly have better things to do with their time.

I agree with CP in that GTS is most likely a 'spoken' language used when every other attempt at communicating verbally has failed (not entering on the subject of pronounciation here).

Maybe an extended version of GTS should be brought to life, the GTS-E, as a community project. The developers could outsource this to people from the playerbase with a linguistic/typographic background.

Good points, Crip, Tosh.

I kinda assumed that most of the sign meanings would be conveyed with graphics rather than straight-up GTS.

I don't remember where I found it, but I downloaded a font file for GTS (not just a vendetta-style font, but the real GTS)...I can type in the language on MS Word.

I think this idea is awesome.

Toshiro had a good suggestion of having some linguist players help develop the language, though I bet there are people right now that would pay to have a sign custom made...even with the language's limitations.

Kray: there are, apparently, several... mine is here: http://www.freewebs.com/mobiusm1/vendetta.htm and allows direct output from keyboard of most major phoenetics.

Yes! Thanks Cunjo...that's where I found it. I've even got WinXP set up to show all window titles and menu titles/options in GTS. It's good lanugage practice and makes others look twice at your computer.

lol, that might not work so well considering there are no characters for c, q, x, y, and the special characters for ng, ch and th are not in the base charater set...

Well, yes there is that...and the fact that the first letter of every word is made invisible, but you get used to it and it's still pretty functional. What did you use to make that font file? I've been wanting to try something like that for a long time.

erf, yea, that's because I didn't put in capital letters... so it only shows the lowercase ones. I should have fixed that while I had the chance.

I was using a trial version of some program, and I really can't even remember what it was called... just google for font creators. Anyway, I can't modify it now, since my month trial is long past :<

Use fontographer. Previously distributed by Macromedia, this little program has helped me through a few tough sopts with bad fonts back in the day.

Demo available.

http://www.fontlab.com/Fontographer/Fontographer/Download-Fontographer/