Longer names

#21

Also, take this character °. In public chat you can’t send it. Try, it won’t work. However it works in PMs.

#22

Lol. Not that that one matters (which is it, the degree ° symbol or small o as in Nª ?). I mean we are chatting, not proving mathematical theories or doing accounting. The few times you need to refer to anything mathematical you can spell it out: “stand at 45 degrees for this phase”, that sort of thing.

But it shows how broken it is, if it’s filtering some things in public chat but not PMs. It makes little sense to do such filtering in the first place. It makes even less sense to have it work two ways for public and private chat, especially as neither is documented and you can only find out what works through trial and error.

#23

10 letter names are way too short but whatever decas loss i didnt bother buying a name change cuz the names i wanted were too long anyway

#24

False. It’s the degree °.

/=l°o°

#25

blyat

#26

same but i ended up getting a name change anyways and renamed to something short instead

#27

So I’m guessing what your saying is that names typed in English or with the English alphabet I think it’s named would be attempted to be translated into a Different text for those located outside the US like Japan/Germany/etc. Or do you mean that other forms of text would be available for names in order to expand name creativity.

#28

While I do agree allowing non-Latin characters to be allowed in user IDs, there are quite a number of new considerations to be made.

1.) The type of Unicode: You need to specify the type of Unicode to use. I’ve always recommended UTF-8 as it has the flexibility of UTF-32 while being able to compress when only ASCII is used.

2.) Not every part of Unicode is usable: You need to specify which parts of Unicode are acceptable for names. Unicode is a system that tries to digitally cover EVERY single writing system in the world, while also making room for control codes and other contextual characters that wouldn’t make sense as part of a name.

3.) You need to render them even if you don’t speak the language: If you want all players to be able to render names (what if a Chinese player decides to go onto USEast2 for some sweet key pops?), then you need a font that can render all of these code points. It’s possible to run multiple different fonts, switching to each depending on the availability of the charset, but there is only one font that is able to act as a catch-all (Unifont) and it may not be ideal for Realm, for various reasons.

4.) The character limit needs to be rethought: Character limiting is easy in ASCII realm, as one byte corresponds to a character, hence you can simple count the bytes. However, in many languages, it can actually take multiple Unicode code points to render a single glyph onto the screen- this makes the limit unintuitive.

5.) There are duplicates… a lot of them: Due to the fact that Unicode attempts to support every possible use, there are a lot of sequences that will look different in binary, but render exactly the same way. Add in diacritics, and grapheme clusters, and this becomes very difficult to work with. This can be extremely problematic for DECA support to really identify data from screenshots/videos, and just problematic for players in general who may find two separate players who appear to have the EXACT same name.

6.) There are also bad people: The added character set means that particularly shady people will use Unicode to their advantage- such as being English speakers but intentionally using non-Latin script to make it harder for other players to track them down. They may also choose a name that looks identical to another player, and do questionable behavior that may get the legitimate player banned from the game.

7.) There are also annoying people: Not all unicode tends to nicely render within a box, and aside from the hundreds of people who will decorate their usernames with annoying characters, they will also intentionally try to break the font rendering system.

#29

Yes. I mean that we should be allowed to use more than just ASCII in chat, other than a-z in names.

The main benefit would be it would let non-English speakers use their own language. As such it would have little impact on English servers. You would see people using other languages already but this already happens. In Europe it’s mostly North European languages. I would guess in the US it’s mostly Spanish.

But it would also let players be more creative in chat, using e.g. emojis or fancier emoticons, some of which use Asian characters. It would mean people could write nonsense but they already can and do. Maybe enabling more options such as emojis would offer them another outlet.

Names they probably still want some restrictions. One would be to enforce only one script, so each name is from a recognised language, as well as ASCII numbers and punctuation. Or they could let any name be created and have a review process that looked at any which breached published guidelines. They already seem to do nothing about offensive names or guild names until reported, so the same could be done for names which breach other guidelines.

#30

I mentioned this in my last post, but it’s worth expanding on as it would address most of your concerns:

Have name selection be language based. By which I mean you choose a language then choose your name. Whether it’s English (the default), German or Japanese once chosen you are limited to that language, as well as perhaps some common elements like numbers and punctuation.

This deals with your points 2 and 5. On 6 people already choose impossible to read names by mixing I and l. As with that the issue is properly rendering names, perhaps just with a different font which clearly distinguishes such letters. Also enable copy and paste so you can simply copy the name of someone you spot doing something wrong.

On 4 it would let the game apply a per-language character limit : 10 in English, 5 in Chinese perhaps – though really the same in any language is easiest.

3 and 7 are really the same issue. And it’s really not a problem, for common languages. Rendering support is built into Flash and is surely available in Unity. It could be more readable but that’s a design issue.

Finally 1 is an implementation detail. But you are right, utf-8 lets you add Unicode with almost no overhead. It has many other advantages and is basically the go-to encoding for almost everything now – certainly everything that is mostly English like Realm is.

#31

Well I speak Chinese and I usually find myself using pinyin in chat. Something I want to say is to make sure to not have words the system doesn’t recognise and crash the game, much like
https://www.pcmag.com › news › this-indian-character-symbol-can-crash-your-phone

#32

9- and/or 10-length names wouldn’t make much difference IMO compared to the 8- we have currently, so sure, go for it. Some of us make do with 5- :sunglasses:

But to the secondary suggestion of characters beyond basic a to z in names, I wouldn’t like that, as someone who does manually type commands (/tp and /trade) would have a harder time (if accents) or borderline impossible (if non-Latin), although localisation of names so if a player uses non-Latin characters they see all the chat including names transliterated, and can type using them, would be nice for those who use such.

(And why type commands? When the mouse-click teleport bugs, eg. when the tp target leaves the area midway between your first and 2nd click triggering the wait timer, /tp command still works. Similar if you try to trade ‘too quickly’ via mouse it can bug forcing you to wait, but /trade will still work).

#33

It’s only hard as you don’t know the language. As e.g. if you know Chinese it’s easy to type, using pinyin in the case of Chinese. As I noted earlier I never need to type other players names – I right-click or copy and paste (from Realmeye). It’s quick and more reliable. Hopefully it will become even easier if the game lets you copy names from the UI and chat.

People should be able to chat, trade etc. in their own language. Forcing them to use English is simply wrong, a dated anglo-centric approach which stopped being justifiable a decade or more ago, once comprehensive language support was added to all OSes and platforms.

#34

I think it’s more about the (in)capability of players to type in alternate character sets, in a system where keyboard command line (if you’re fast at typing) provides a better way of executing commands than mouseclicks, and when the mouse method bugs, the only quick alternative to overcome the bug.

Definitely, having the game allow copy/paste would work fine as a solution, since then anybody regardless of localisation could copy a name from in-game chat, and paste it into the command line.

And of course, fixing the underlying bugs with click-commands should be done.

There’s also another accessibility question than language, that we’re kind of straying into, as the keyboard AND mouse combination is something that is also quite old-fashioned – if they could get the game to natively work via mobile phone for example, the game would get a whole nother audience. But maybe that’s for another discussion topic.

#35

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