VN Locale Problems Explained By A Gamedev in Japan (Especially for VNs like OG FSN)

[@wuiruiruiru]

Explaining locales and character encoding to modern gamers what a madlad Shoutout to all the fan TL hackers way back when who worked through all these issues among others and got playable games into VN fans’ hands. If any of you are reading this, I love yall

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@wuiruiruiru The true madlad are those people who hacked and TL'ed the games if anything　🔥🔥🔥 Still remembering the Little Busters group and their 10 year fight to complete the game

[@LazyDarkLord]

And this is the reason why I set my PC to Japanese locale and make it my system official since 2013 (including my laptop) despite me not nihongo jouzu 🤣

[@overworkedsalaryman]

lol though fr it really is the best way to do it if you do play vns quite a lot in particular makes things so much more convinient

[@とふこ]

Actually it is only changing the way how the non Unicode programs are displayed so if you played lot of VNs that makes sense. Especially because a lot of official translations on dlsite for smaller VN/indie doujin games are also recommend to use Japanese system local.

[@Kurogane3]

shoutout to applocale gang

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@Kurogane3 Oh yea, that's another one too, based

[@matizArts]

I dream of the day when Japanese game devs finally switch to UTF-8.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Gotta believe that one day they'll stop using kirkiri because tbh I don't think anyone actually updates the engine anymore lol

[@dpm365]

I think the big thing is this was too high profile a release for this kind of issue, especially since not only have others avoided the problem, but Type Moon already released an English language version of another VN without this problem. Though I can assure you anyone who has actually been around the block have seen some shit. My personal favorite for strangest fan translation glitch was how if you played Symphonic Rain before applying the patch it would brick the install such that it couldn't render text, forcing you to do a fresh reinstall of both the game and the patch. Real OGs will remember this one though. The fan translator of MonsterGirl Quest ran into an issue of not being able to create saves while there were half width characters in the textbox. His hack solution was to just write "SAVE HERE" in full width characters before and after any combat encounter or choice.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Yea for sure, this was such a big release that an issue like this happening was just strange tbh. Especially considering as you said that they have released previous titles before. Not only that, the fix took them less than a day meaning that they prolly were very well aware what the issue was hence the quick update on steam. Symphonic Rain's sounds wild though that it managed to completely kill the install. Usually I hear of it becoming a garbled mess but that one just sounds bizarrely funny. Wonder what caused it on that level though. Half width being a big issue I can imagine yea since those are in a weird character size that may not have been handled well especially back then though that workaround sounds hilarious. Can imagine it being really memorable of one

[@artemix3944]

I've heard from passing, that Symphonic Rain used the most unorthodox way to edit the script for the translations way back then and that it was a miracle it even worked.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@artemix3944 That sounds like an interesting thing to read up on. I'll go see if I can find out more about it.

[@eruno_]

thank you eroge sensei

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@eruno_ Now you too can be an eroge master!

[@BrBetim]

Thought this was going to be a video on localization until i remembered the stuff i had to mess with to make some rpg maker games work in english. Good stuff!

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@BrBetim I'd say that this is more the technical side of localisation so you ain't too far off! Especially since if this isn't proper done, no amount of localisation of the words will get the VN out of Japan because companies here lag so bad in tech adoption even their tech needs localisation 🤣

[@ChiefWombatCuddler]

The localization issue beyond technology is a political hotbed bro SHOULD NOT touch unless he doesn't care about the YT overlords and their "motherly" tendencies to "correct narratives" at all moments.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@ChiefWombatCuddler Plus it goes beyond my scope of expertise as well so I'm not gonna push any narratives on that front since the whole issue beyond it gets quite muddied

[@ChiefWombatCuddler]

@@overworkedsalaryman Can't blame you, plus you're a game dev, active within the scene. Unless you become a publisher, weighing in on this, seems like career seppuku... 😅

[@peachybear3807]

I completely forgot locales were a thing this is a blast from the past lol

[@overworkedsalaryman]

ikr. Especially since nowadays most companies actually remember to factor that in when developing so this ended up being so nostalgic instead lol

[@ihavenoshameandmustscream421]

I finally found a KZbin channel that talks about all the stuff that I love and geek out on the most. So very interesting!

[@overworkedsalaryman]

I'm glad the stuff is interesting to you and that you enjoy the journey whereever this might take us o7

[@not_sviiseven]

This video somehow flew under my radar. For me at this point, I switched my computer's locale to JP from the start since I'm in the fan translation scene, and because I read untranslated stuff often enough to not bother with locale emulators. Thankfully in the past few years, programmers in the scene are much more willing to drop the source for their tools and libraries on a github repo to make Fan TL process much more seamless for both the group and the readers. It makes modifying engines like KiriKiri, Buriko, and AdvHD much more bareable. Though, there are plenty titles that are stuck in time and don't run on modern OSes, and so we have to pick apart libraries (closed source unfortunately) from other fan patches that fix similar problems.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Can imagine that makes preservation of older titles a lot tougher... especially for smaller titles what with the weird ways people used to code here back then and the fact that getting some of the libraries would be hard since the companies aren't likely to get back on that. But it's great to hear that at least with more recent titles it's becoming more accessible than ever before because of the the changes in how things are done in the fan TL scene! There's so much that I really wish were more accessible to the global audiences so they can see all that VNs have to offer so it's cool to hear that things are getting more optimised to make TL'ing works more of a possibility.

[@jeffy.958]

Thank you very much for this insightful video. In my opinion, Japanese game developers shouldn't be hesitant about releasing their games worldwide, just be more careful about who does the translating. And on my end, my only issue with the Fate Stay Night Remastered was that is was the Realta Nua version where the "spicy" scenes were removed.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

I'm glad you found the video interesting 🙏 Indeed it does feel like picking the translator is very important as well and is something that still seems to be quite questionable of late with what people were complaining about with ZZZ too. That said I have not played the remastered yet so not too sure about this but the scenes were removed for this version of the game too? If so that's a lil disappointing...

[@ihavenoshameandmustscream421]

Oh yeah if I remember it correctly, Shiro and Tosaka's scene from UBW was replace in Realta Nua with both of them just lying in bed together to transfer Rin's magic to Shiro.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@ihavenoshameandmustscream421 Ah the era of actually replacing scenes rather than just cutting them out altogether... truly was a different time back then lol

[@drew_echo]

I work in software in the US & even today in the hyperglobal west engineers still don't understand locale / character encodings. We keep getting bugs like whoopsies the applications breaks when my username has some non-ascii character in it because an engineer used a wrong width string for filepaths or some other user string input. And in that case it's not even the game engine but legacy skeletons from the programming language or ancient OS APIs which is even harder to deal with since even if your game engine, modern OS APIs, Qt, etc provide safe ways to handle strings, an engineer at any time can decide they want to use one of the legacy ones.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@drew_echo Sounds like it really is a problem everywhere in the world huh... kind curious what types of characters would tend to break more there since unicode feels like it was supposed to be more all-encompassing even tho it kinda ended up not being

[@Kenionatus]

Having read an article on the history of Unicode in Japan, issues with han character unification seem to have been to a large part caused by Japanese character sets pre-Unicode already being a mess and an already ongoing culture war within Japan. (Including historical government pressure for the reduction of the characters in common use.) Then again, it is a singular source, so it might missrepresent the issue. I'll try posting the link in a response and hope it won't get filtered by YT.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@Kenionatus hopefully it doesn't but yea there was a lot of cultural conflict about it back in the day when JP-KR-CN relations were alot worse as well which feels like it may have reinforced usage of SJIS in a way but I'm not an expert and this is what it seems like when i read about it at least

[@thefrikking5648]

As usual you make informative and useful videos, my gratitude for your work.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@thefrikking5648 I'm glad you founm the video interesting 🙏 Truly this does feel like one of those things that needs to be said every 10 years when a new generation of people get exposed to Japan's old tech. Wonder how long till this actually becomes no longer a thing

[@Pertruabo]

My favourite overworked employee is back

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@PertruaboHello hello, indeed it be indeed it do 😎

[@NozomuYume]

VN veteran here who already knew all this, but you presented it well to everyone else so you got a subscriber and you deserve all the internet. ^^

[@overworkedsalaryman]

With the FSN remaster I saw so many new people who didn't even know what a locale was that I figured maybe it's time to make a video on it for those people too. Though thank you for the sub friendly person 🙏

[@philbertius]

Touhou modders probably dealt with this in painstaking detail. Literal binary modifications, hooking method calls to interpret new strings of text as Unicode rather than SJIS. (Does DirectDraw even render SJIS data???) The real hassle trying to support Japanese today is IME support. (The kanji selection thing when you start typing in Japanese.) Totally extra input step that requires application awareness to function properly.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Did IME become something more necessary recently? Curious how that's impacting the games tbh since I have not heard about that one recently. Though can imagine touhou modders prolly having to bend over backwards to get stuff to work especially with how the older titles way back in the day were coded. Sounds like such a helluva pain having to do all of that manually just because of SJIS but yea back in the day at least DirectDraw didn't do that though am not sure about nowadays.

[@philbertius]

@@overworkedsalaryman Honestly IME is not that common, only needed if you're letting the player type a lot (e.g. chat or in-game console). Not a lot of indies will touch that. Yeah Touhou is crazy, apparently every enemy projectile gets its own virtual machine or something? I heard that but I refuse to believe it. Also there's a proprietary scripting language for them, lol. But they've seriously modded those games to hell and back. Tons of tools for making your own translations, fights, characters, etc. Really impressive tech imho. All by manipulating the exe, intercepting DLL calls.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@philbertius A virtual machine for every enemy projectile sounds insane if true lol though it does sound pretty cool the level to which fans hve managed to mod the game tbh Didn't know about the original scripting language tho that's interesting

[@zerofighterfairy]

Secret Ilya Route finally 😭😭😭

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@zerofighterfairy So as we pray, unlimited Illya works

[@el_primer_y_el_ultimo_caiman]

we will be watching

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Hopefully in a good way 🙏

[@HaydenTheHistorian]

insane suit 🔥🔥🔥

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@HaydenTheHistorian Thank you, I do enjoy wearing it since work in tech does require it like other industries. Now I just need a tie to go along with it

[@mx338]

That is a great fate tapestry.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

I rlly like it too although it did feel a lil awkward deciding whether or not to use it for this specific video XD

[@DoktorBeta]

i've had my locale set to japanese for like 10 years to use UTAU even though i've still never successfully used it for anything...

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@DoktorBeta Gotta love how every other application still works fine with Japanese locale meanwhile the reverse is like... Though maybe someday you'll make a banger with it

[@Igorooooleynikov]

Yeah, I remember this locale thing. Tried to play grid based dungeon crawler and had to mess with windows XP to make it run+ use some live translation tool. It parsed game in realtime for any text and attempted to translate it.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Oh yea I remember some of those. Was cool to see machine translation tools like that doing it in real time back in the day although it prolly worked alot better for the dungeon crawler you played hopefully XD I tried using it for a visual novel for fun back then and it was quite bad the one I tested out though it might just be a tool or genre issue.

[@kamarulbahari152]

From the background, this guy seems to be spending the whole night and back to the next night explaining things that I've'nt encountered for a long,long time.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

In a very irresponsible move of trying to make the video make it in time before I went for Comiket I pulled an all-nighter and added in some parts the following night so you're actually very correct lol

[@nomado-sensei]

If you even think you suck at game development, remember that there is still giant titles that people mange to fuck up.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@nomado-sensei Just like when big weeb store chains in Akiba get all their English signs wrong, the degrees to which they find ways to mess up at times is truly astounding

[@mx338]

Funnily enough not an issue on Linux, when running Windows executables through WINE it does automatically detects the locale.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

It's funny how much more Linux can easily deal with that. Maybe that's why they wanted to check on chinese and english os lmao

[@seraphinax6449]

On Linux I manually set the LC_ALL environmental variable before launching the application through the terminal and it just works.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@seraphinax6449 sounds like Linux just generally handles this much better than windows lol

[@seraphinax6449]

@@overworkedsalaryman Yeah, there is not even a need to restart and can keep everything else in English language and data/time in western format.

[@fraktaalimuoto]

​@@overworkedsalarymanDespite that it requires some learning, Linux is simply much much more flexible operating system than Windows. I have used Linux since 2003, and have grown to appreciate it.

[@LazyDarkLord]

2:26 I feel I got called out...

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Don't worry, it technically is me calling out me from almost 20 years ago as well lol

[@themarky2714]

I can recall setting up my locale to JP and using applocale just to play Saya no Uta, Sengoku Rance, Utawarerumono (PC) and some other JP games I've already forgotten. Somehow, I downloaded School Days and some Fate games (SN and HA) but never got to play it. On a side note, I was used to playing Gachas like SIF, FFRK, and Bandori in JP despite only being above N4, generally relying on manually translating shit I don't get. Everything changed when I started playing Azur Lane (one of the main music guys was coincidentally the same guy who worked on Rance) and never looked back, and stuck exclusively with EN. Too much time and effort. But yeah, those were the good 'ol days with too much free time.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@themarky2714 Can imagine it'd be tough trying to do AL in JP especially since the language requirement is higher too tho yea, crazy how locale problems used to exist back then lol

[@MoguMasso]

"To fix the error switch the locale to Japanese". Oh shit here we go again...

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Yea real deja vu, I feel like I've been in this place before

[@night_fiend6]

A workaround that comes to mind is that the launcher could run a script to change locale and then change it back if the game closes or crashes.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

It definitely would be nice and convenient if games could do something like that tbh. Especially for older titles where this is still a very real problem

[@AlbedoAtoned]

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that changing the locale requires the user to at least log out and log back into their user account. It's not something that can be quickly changed back and forth quickly. A compromise would be to figure out how "Locale Emulator" works and create some sort of wrapper for the game exe.

[@RiderWithTheScarf]

Nice to see others remembering Locale...

[@overworkedsalaryman]

lol mgs truly has the best memes. XD But yea from what I've been seeing online at least it does seem like there just are fewer people who know about it in the newer gens at least since more VNs are available optimised on steam so it really affects the minority of hardcore VN players who are trying all the JP exclusive titles still. At least now more people get to know about it again though XD

[@poethewondercat7851]

I remember using floppy disks. 3.5 AND 5.25. I also remember using BASIC programs on audio cassettes. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to turn into a pile of dust and blow away...

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Next thing I know you'll be saying you had to use a computer with a wheel crank that had to be spun every few hours to keep it running XD Though nono come back, we still need to hear more about the good old days of 5Mb data storaaaaaaaaaaaage!

[@yumekarisu9168]

11:57 as someone who's currently studying Japanese in uni. Those two character confused the crap out of me precisely because of that issue 😭

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Yea the Kanji languages all have this issue to some extent. When I learn Chinese 17 plus years ago I remember it being even more confusing since they take the similar but mildly different thing to a whole other level than Japanese. But even with Japanese especially with the multiple pronunciations for certain characters it can get so confusing trying to differentiate between them I'd imagine

[@hikaritsumi2123]

I still set my new PC to Japanese locale despite haven't play VN for a decade since I wasn't legally able to play those game and as a salary man I have purchased a lot of them, to the point where current backlog is more than my current age

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Lol, hopefully you manage to clear through all of them at some point that'd be p cool XD Though with how little having a JP locale affects most daily life stuff it certainly does feel like there's no harm in doing so especially since it helps ensure games from Japan don't break down in the edge cases where locale is needed

[@hikashia.halfiah3582]

17:40 for me, anything beyond 1GB is already pretty big. I will very hesitatingly download anything over 10GB, which the only time I remember is when playing ROTK13+fame&strategy, because I just really like playing as free character then saving (recruiting) best waifu Dong Bai before Diaochan-Lubu-DongZhuo event, where anyone related to Dong Zhuo will get purged by default. The last time I did anything close is downloading the almost 10GB yoake mae yori ruri iro na 15th anniv package, because I really like Sakakibara Yui's new version of Eternal Destiny. I don't think I have downloaded anything beyond 20GB in my life. And yes, I'm someone who experienced using the floppy disk during my very small childhood. Actually even got the chance to literally touch the big floppy disk thing.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@hikashia.halfiah3582 Rlly liked as a kid to open a diskut to touch the film in the middle tho that prolly isn't something we're supposed to do 🤣 But it is rough that games now are getting so massive... so many are around 70-100gb and it's mostly indie games and ck3 now that are prolly under 10. Forgot RTK 13 let you do that though, rlly feel like I should go back and give it a try sometime

[@Spyduck]

Thanks for explaining. Although I no longer play VNs, man, locales were a pain to negotiate our systems with.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

They truly were annoying to deal with I'd imagine, especially for people manually changing them in and out of JP locale. That said, glad you found the video interesting 🙏

[@magnumic2419]

I hear JIS, I hear the reason my JP JIS layout keyboard bought in japan took me forever to get working on NA windows at home XD Anyways, nice video for those who recently got into VNs and the scene :D

[@overworkedsalaryman]

I can only imagine how confusing that keyboard is to use at home lmao. I have an ergonomic keyboard produced in the US because one of the directors in the company I'm currently working in recommended it which causes all sorts of confusion since I have a US layout at home and a JIS layout at work so I feel your pain

[@Chris3s]

Nowadays you don't need to change your locale into japanese, you can just use the locale emulator and run the game using that. All games I used it on ran without issues

[@overworkedsalaryman]

I remember hearing of those, glad there is a more convenient way to do it now that sounds like such a blessing to have

[@Istreakilaz]

Yep! My greatest disappointment with my new high end laptop that i bought 2 years ago -with the slavery of my sweat, blood and other bodily fluids- was that locale emulator isn't supported on Windows11 and it came pre-installed with it orz (there are often file corruptions that can happen if you unpack files that are encoded in in the incorrect language for the current locale, which CAN cause the sys32 dll files to be damaged if i force run it, and CAN void my software warranty so...) On top of that, my brother really hates having to deal with the directory denominators changing from Slash to Yen after changing the syslocale, that's why emulating locale was the go to. Oh well, these are just relics of the past.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

It's funny because just last week a friend of my just had this problem with a doujin game that released this year. Apparently with that one the coding was so weird that he not only had to change his syslocale but the time date format on the pc had to also be specifically changed for the game to run XD Though yea some of the changes are definetly annoying. As someone who uses an ergonormic imported keyboard at home with both JP and EN keyboards installed and a standard keyboard at work with just the JP one the fact that when I push the button in the same orientation a different thing pops up can be quite annoying at times...

[@3750gustavo]

What about the Japanese locale emulator? I have a app that allows me to right click a 32bits Japanese app and play in Japanese locale

[@overworkedsalaryman]

That's a great way to do it too and it works as well. Haven't really had to use one but from what I saw back in the day typically some of them used to recommend it as an alternative to when locale doesn't work or is difficult to change but it definitely is the more convinient and user friendly way to go about it.

[@RetroSmoo]

I'm a linux user so it's a bit more effort to setup too. Gotta use winetricks and protontricks to install Japanese fonts when using proton etc

[@overworkedsalaryman]

That really does sound like a lot more hoops for sure... is it different depending on the type of Linux OS used or is it all the same like that?

[@Josephll64]

Using JP version titles made me always leave my computers in the JP locale for over a decade now. Funny how programs in the reverse aren't anywhere close to being as severely impacted.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@Josephll64 ikr, on the one hand I get it since Japan uses english characters for coding anyway so it's a thing that won't die on a jp system but on the other hand why aren't all of these non-english characters properly tabled 😵‍💫

[@DeWillpower]

as someone that now is typing in the langauge that many know on the internet, i was scared to do anything related to downloading a program in my computer because for how much stupid it may sound i needed a video like this 15 years ago, not a weird adult man explaining in my own language "do this without questioning anything"

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Yea I know the feel, especially back then there were a lot more issues of shady bloatware and spyware that people, even the companies producing the operating systems weren't as aware of and so getting exploited was a lot easier to. Things like people saying download accelerator plus etc was good and stuff without any explanation is something that was such a problem too imo. This video may have ended up being 15 years late but hopefully for the next gen of VN players maybe it will help them avoid the same predicament.

[@DeWillpower]

@@overworkedsalaryman yes, it will c:

[@PGM991]

Local Emulator is a must to play various Eroge❤

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Yea it's really quite important for enjoyin alot of the er... plot that exists out there XD

[@TBoneTony]

Fan Translations are the way to go when it comes to playing Visual Novels outside of Japan. I was around back during Hirameki, G-Collections and Peach Princess publishing 2000s Visual Novels.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@TBoneTony Especially with how slow TLs officially take and well... after nukitashi it feels like people would prolly rather just fan tls now too lol

[@nguyenphu-o5d]

This make me realize that I have been setting my computer on Jp local for 5 years for research purposes 🙃

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Gotta love how so little issue there is with EN stuff on JP locale that it complete works so you can continue your research 😌

[@DaVince21]

The Han unification issue is still a thing, unfortunately. I'm not sure the Unicode consortium has ever updated the spec to finally give all of the offending characters their own codepoints.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Last I heard it wasn't complete yet yea... with the increase in integers it feels like they really should have done something about it so the fact that this issue still exists is strange

[@theamazingfan8889]

Ah yes locale because of this it took me 4 days to run the vns i wanted. At first the jp locale application didn't work than i downloaded windows 10 jp version to run those vns but they would still crash because just when i try to go to in game it crashes than tried windows 7 jp version still crashing than i checked when these vn came out they came out around 2006 both from same studio and thab windows xp was relevant and 7 launched in 2009. I tried xp jp edition and finally they worked took me long enough i think xp had some kind of Unicode for jp language which got changed in 7 or didn't supported after xp

[@overworkedsalaryman]

Can imagine how problematic it can be especially with all the OS side compatibility that exists for older VNs too yea >.> That's another thing that I wish was much easier to handle as well; all of the compatibility emulation and all that for very dated OSes though there very well might be and I just don't know about it too but it would be nice if all of that had an easy solution so we can easily play older titles too.

[@theamazingfan8889]

@@overworkedsalaryman one all rounder solution i found if those old vns had .xp3 file package system than kirikiridroid 2 can run all of them directly unpacking the .xp3 package like taimanin titles , prision battleship etc

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@theamazingfan8889 Ah, that does sound like a good workaround too. Glad that works tbh

[@SilentVinyl]

Persona 3 reload on Xbox one for some reason only has Japanese and Chinese language choices if the system language is not in English but when the system language is switched to English, only then you can choose English

[@overworkedsalaryman]

That is a really strange but interesting choice tbh. Wonder why they did it that way since it prolly takes more effort to do that... unless it has to do with some weird licensing thing with the voices that makes them choose to exclude the other languages for the EN regions kinda like how early 2010s EN titles had only EN voices and subs and JP was fully removed...

[@SilentVinyl]

@@overworkedsalaryman Yeah, I was confused when I started the game and I then had to google that I have to change my system language from Finnish to English to have access to English language choices even the text choices were Japanese or Chinese only before the system language change.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@SilentVinyl Wait it was JP/CN only even for non-English languages outside of Asia? Ok that's really a lot wilder than I initially thought. Guess they really did just mess up with the switch-case they used for it perhaps which is doubly funny

[@SilentVinyl]

@@overworkedsalaryman Yes, English was only available when the system language was set to English, it is slightly annoying to have to change the system language to English to even have English as an option.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@SilentVinyl I can imagine it would be yea. Idk why they even made that decision especially when English is the only available language among all the languages available in Europe in the first place

[@MorbidEel]

I wonder if the "fix" was simply to hardcode a locale switch into the code like in the first line of main()

[@overworkedsalaryman]

With how quickly they resolved the issue... it very well could've been lol

[@BellowDGaming]

I haven't heard Unicode in a long time.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@BellowDGaming I can imaginn yea, infinibrain shifted some of theirs to unity or other engines when porting and many big VN companies do too so it def hasn't been a thing that needs to be talked about as much... but then everything changed when the fsn remastered released

[@Kenionatus]

Sounds like everything you use is in Unicode then.

[@sarkwalvein]

Locale? Long life mirror moon! Would probably also be a very boomer thing to say, who knows...

[@overworkedsalaryman]

To the modern crowd of people who never knew any of these issues exist at all we all prolly sound like boomers lol so welcome to the boomerfam. Though fr mirror mooon was p good too forgot about it

[@ReOnion]

Might be a dumb question but, what about other way around? Does JP users have problem with Unicode cuz their pc uses SJIS

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@ReOnion It mostly doesn't have issues as far as i know. Might be because of how the english characters are encoded since Japan does use Engish a fair amount as well especially in coding

[@vytah]

Unicode doesn't cause problems. The problem is that Windows offers two sets of APIs, the newer one uses Unicode, the older one uses local text encoding, and if you use the older one, users from outside your region will see garbled text. SJIS is simply the encoding used in the old API in Japan. I had locale based problems with programs from all over the world, so it's not a Japan-only issue.

[@overworkedsalaryman]

@@vytah That is a good explanation thank you for clearing it up 🙇

[@spitfire7170]

ah unicode, constantly adding more emojis that no one asked for but never fixing the issue with most kanji and hanzi having the same exact code with no way to specify the right one, not even a simple modifier even though they've added modifiers to many already existing emoji before proving it's not impossible...

[@overworkedsalaryman]

But if they don't add more emojis how is sony going to make an emoji movie sequel? : < Though jokes aside it really feels like there isn't a good reason why they haven't dealt with this issue yet. Back then it made a lil more sense when they gave the excuse of not having enough codes due to a lack of integers but with the integer expansions in later years it does feel like even that excuse doesn't make sense anymore...