Non ASCII text support

I guess it depends on how you store and render your text but personally, I use UTF-8 throughout our engine. It is very easy to retro-fit to an existing code-base.

 

Support UTF-8 or Unicode.

What applications or engines are you using? I wager every commercial application supports UTF-8 (Notepad does). That will let you localize to any language.

 

For that precise reason, I use standard windows fonts (currently Calibri) which supports all the languages you mention and others too.

Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_typefaces

 

There are two levels of scaling up for this.

All the EFIGS glyphs are in am extended ASCII codepage that is usually called ISO-LATIN1. It just so happens that this overlaps perfectly with the first 256 characters of unicode. So if all you want is EFIGS, you can still use bytes for your strings and standard font tools to get your characters out similar to however you do it now.

If you want "weird" alphabets like Cyrillic etc., then what I do is make my font export tool save out a big chart of used glyphs based on the localised text input you give it. Keep your strings in a file, pass this file into the tool - it can then save out the strings as 2byte characters and some rectangles for where their images went. I use freetype in my tool and TTF fonts that actually have all the unicode stuff in em - which are actually pretty few as you'd imagine.

The above isn't the only way, but it works great for me. All the grunt work is done by a totally automated offline tool and my string class in game already uses w_char so it all just works.

 

I think I mentioned it already