Special characters?

[Ultimo]

I was making a character whose name should have an umlaut to be spelled correctly, but I couldn't get the game to recognize it.  I tried copy/paste, but that didn't work either.

 

Is there a way to put a letter with an umlaut (or other special characters) into a character's name or bio?

[Greycat]

Nope. They don't use the whole ASCII set (or whatever character set the game's recognizing.)

I've got one character I'd like to remake whose name really would rely on umlauts, too...

[Ukase]

I certainly wouldn't know with any measure of certainty, but I see all kinds of characters used in chat that aren't part of our 26 letter alphabet. I've seen hearts, even. If we can get a heart, surely we have one of those umlauts somewhere. 

But maybe the text field for the names in the character creators have a different set of rules? No idea. 
@Laucianna is often using symbols/characters that aren't in the English alphabet - they may know a trick. 

[Techwright]

11 minutes ago, Ukase said:

But maybe the text field for the names in the character creators have a different set of rules? No idea.

 

No certain idea either, but I suspect this is the case. If so, it makes a certain sense.  Not everyone uses the code chart, and many of those don't even know how to go about it.  This would cause a lot of problems and frustration in trying to find a name.  Many who put together teams still haven't figured out the concept of clicking on a character's name in chat and selecting "invite to team", and instead type out the characters' name.  Not sure why that is.  If they have not figured that bit out, it's likely an umlaut would frustrate them and they'd move on to a name without one.   It may not be proper, but casual typing in chat without such a character is common, and forgiveable, but precision matters to the programming when identifying a name to invite to the team, which is the same reason why one would need to know if "Ir0nMan" had a zero or a capital O in their name when inviting them.

[Ukase]

Heh, that reminds me of a time on Retail when I made a tank called Tat. In the description/bio area, I wrote, "Tit for Tat." 

I got more blind invites for Tat than any other character. I always assumed it was because the name was short, and easy to type out. 

Unlike some of my polysyllabic names that are not only hard to pronounce, but hard to spell properly. 

[LKN-351]

The name entry and chat entry definitely have different letter usage rules. You can use Kanji in chat but not in character names, and I know I used at least one other written language that has odd characters and it was the same situation.

I THINK I used Russian words in one of my character bios also.

[mechahamham]

28 minutes ago, LKN-351 said:

The name entry and chat entry definitely have different letter usage rules. You can use Kanji in chat but not in character names, and I know I used at least one other written language that has odd characters and it was the same situation.

I THINK I used Russian words in one of my character bios also.

 

At first I thought that this was defined by the split between Montreal and MS Gothic. Montreal, which is the default chat font, is a pretty standard Latin font in terms of the number of characters it contains. It's got all the umlauts. ÖÖÖÖ. All the CJK characters like Kanji as well as the special symbols like hearts and musical notes are in MS Gothic.

 

However, if you try to use a character in Montreal that's not 'standard' for English, it won't even allow you to type or paste it in the character name field.

 

So somewhere in the character creation code is a list of 'valid' characters that's English Latin glyphs, Arabic digits, and a few punctuation symbols.

[lemming]

I think name entries didn't have the extended ascii, plus restricted rules on some punctuation.   Trying to avoid Bobby Droptable

[LKN-351]

I was surprised and disappointed that the game wouldnt let you use Æ in the name field.

I was also surprised that you can't use umlauts since the game had a german release.

[WanderingAries]

It was most assuredly discussed back on live, but (IIRC) the difference has to do with the variable type or something along those lines for coding purposes. Chat is easy because it's just a log basically, so it's essentially just plain text. The character names have to be easily searchable as well as able to be filtered (PG rating and all that), so while you may be typing text, it's being treated differently by the game. The Good thing is that you can do whatever you like (AFAIK) in your Bio, so while the name may not show what you like, the Bio likely can.

[Laucianna]

13 hours ago, Ukase said:

I certainly wouldn't know with any measure of certainty, but I see all kinds of characters used in chat that aren't part of our 26 letter alphabet. I've seen hearts, even. If we can get a heart, surely we have one of those umlauts somewhere. 

But maybe the text field for the names in the character creators have a different set of rules? No idea. 
@Laucianna is often using symbols/characters that aren't in the English alphabet - they may know a trick. 

There are a lot of unique characters you can use in game, a lot of mine I get from https://fsymbols.com/emoticons/ and test which ones work in game by copying and pasting them in local before placing them into my binds or pop menus ❤️ (✿◠‿◠)  is by far my fav!

[Purrfekshawn]

Heh, l can remember, howeva, that these symbols CAN be used for Architect Entertainment. For lnstance - "AV Beatdown Past Edition" (#21066) from my sig contains an enemy called "Jötunn" (and the "ö" letta is shown correctly).

 

Thea'z bug @Barracuda's mission that's probably due to dev/author those projected the mission back in a day didn't know that "Umlauts" can be shown correctly @entitties, & they called an add "Unterfuhrer", when it must have been "Unterführer". It's spelled differently - first you pronounce as "Oonterfoohrehr", while another one as "Oonterfewhrehr"!

 

U may try and copypaste special symbols from UNICODE text file to character naming window & see if it lets you to.

[Scarlet Shocker]

It would be good if we could have a wider diversity of characters to choose from but right now I think I wanna make a brute called Ummm Lout

[srmalloy]

On 8/2/2024 at 10:37 AM, LKN-351 said:

The name entry and chat entry definitely have different letter usage rules. You can use Kanji in chat but not in character names, and I know I used at least one other written language that has odd characters and it was the same situation.

I THINK I used Russian words in one of my character bios also.

The character names are force-limited to ASCII 32-127, while the game proper supports a subset of Unicode (limited more by the game font than the client itself; it has Cyrillic, Greek, hiragana, katakana, and Devanagari characters, but not, for example, Ugaritic. I have characters with foreign backgrounds, and I've set up popmenus with common speech items in the appropriate language (although I used Romaji for the Japanese popmenu, since I figured no one would be able to read it in kanji/hiragana).

[Ukase]

I can't believe I didn't say this in the first place. 

If you want Special Characters - consider recruiting @Snarky. He's a very special character. 

[WanderingAries]

20 hours ago, srmalloy said:

The character names are force-limited to ASCII 32-127, while the game proper supports a subset of Unicode (limited more by the game font than the client itself; it has Cyrillic, Greek, hiragana, katakana, and Devanagari characters, but not, for example, Ugaritic. I have characters with foreign backgrounds, and I've set up popmenus with common speech items in the appropriate language (although I used Romaji for the Japanese popmenu, since I figured no one would be able to read it in kanji/hiragana).

 

When Rad came out, I made a couple characters that utilized Cyrillic for...reasons. 😛

[srmalloy]

3 hours ago, WanderingAries said:

When Rad came out, I made a couple characters that utilized Cyrillic for...reasons. 😛

I have a fair number of characters with Russian or ex-Soviet backgrounds -- Ядерный Огонь, БРИГАДИР, Черная Молния, Удар Молнии, Совня, Стальная Дева, and others, eventually building up a headcanon of various heroes, villains, and hero and villain groups (Народная Армия, Красный Угроза), the state-sponsored hero groups being largely disbanded with the breakup of the Soviet Union, causing a diaspora of heroes to other countries. I also did some digging when writing up backgrounds, using real Russian research institutions where I could, like Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова (the I.M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry); this let me build loose connections between the backgrounds of different characters to show them as coming from a common culture, rather than springing out full-blown with no connection to anything else. Unfortunately, because Unicode characters are two bytes wide, they chew up a disproportionate amount of space in the 1023-character limit for a character background, which limits what can be inserted for flavor.

 

One of the characters, БРИГАДИР, wound up with a background that spilled way over the 1023-byte limit, and I wound up continuing his background as a text file that currently sits at six and a half pages, stuck on my not being able to write a combat scene I'm satisfied with. He was my first MM back on Live, a Bots/Dark -- an experimental director for combat robots that became sentient and was shut down and packed away in a storage bunker after he started ignoring the direction of the officers defining his mission plan when he could see more efficient ways to accomplish the mission goals; the Ministry of Defense wanted a soulless combat manager that would direct equally-soulless shock troops into frontal assaults with no consideration for casualties, and what they got was a cybernetic Napoleon critiquing the tactical failings of the officers who tried to order him into action.

[WanderingAries]

7 hours ago, srmalloy said:

I have a fair number of characters with Russian or ex-Soviet backgrounds -- Ядерный Огонь, БРИГАДИР, Черная Молния, Удар Молнии, Совня, Стальная Дева, and others, eventually building up a headcanon of various heroes, villains, and hero and villain groups (Народная Армия, Красный Угроза), the state-sponsored hero groups being largely disbanded with the breakup of the Soviet Union, causing a diaspora of heroes to other countries. I also did some digging when writing up backgrounds, using real Russian research institutions where I could, like Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова (the I.M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry); this let me build loose connections between the backgrounds of different characters to show them as coming from a common culture, rather than springing out full-blown with no connection to anything else. Unfortunately, because Unicode characters are two bytes wide, they chew up a disproportionate amount of space in the 1023-character limit for a character background, which limits what can be inserted for flavor.

 

One of the characters, БРИГАДИР, wound up with a background that spilled way over the 1023-byte limit, and I wound up continuing his background as a text file that currently sits at six and a half pages, stuck on my not being able to write a combat scene I'm satisfied with. He was my first MM back on Live, a Bots/Dark -- an experimental director for combat robots that became sentient and was shut down and packed away in a storage bunker after he started ignoring the direction of the officers defining his mission plan when he could see more efficient ways to accomplish the mission goals; the Ministry of Defense wanted a soulless combat manager that would direct equally-soulless shock troops into frontal assaults with no consideration for casualties, and what they got was a cybernetic Napoleon critiquing the tactical failings of the officers who tried to order him into action.

 

Heh, I have a file (From Live!) where I keep all of my character Bio's, thumbnails, etc. It made it Real easy rebuilding my alt list when HC came out.

[srmalloy]

13 hours ago, WanderingAries said:

Heh, I have a file (From Live!) where I keep all of my character Bio's, thumbnails, etc. It made it Real easy rebuilding my alt list when HC came out.

I exported all my characters from Guardian using Titan Icon before the shutdown, so I can open the saved character file and copy out the character bio if I recreate the character. Unfortunately, when a character bio involves a lot of Unicode, I usually have to do a lot of transliteration and editing. For example, the first part of БРИГАДИР's origin story (up to the flashback) before abridgement to make it fit:

 

…
Калибрование…
Один…
Два…
Три…
Базовые системы онлайн.
Чек памяти… Переданный.
Кодовые модули… Нагруженный.
Просмотр окружающей среды…
Угрозы: Ноль.
Эксплуатационный БРИГАДИР.

A crate buried in the depths of a dusty, forgotten warehouse is a lonely thing to wake up in. 
Even when you're a robot. БРИГАДИР ('Taskmaster') was the prototype for a robotic officer, 
the director for a squad — or a platoon or company — of robotic infantrymen. But the Soviet 
researchers had built better than they knew. The Ministry of Defense wanted a soulless combat 
manager that would direct equally-soulless shock troops into frontal assaults with no 
consideration for casualties; what they got was a cybernetic Napoleon critiquing the tactical 
failings of the officers who tried to order him into action. When he decided the orders he'd 
gotten were practical, he could carry them out flawlessly. When given orders he decided were 
ill-conceived, he would as often as not completely disregard those orders and undertake a 
different objective, or at best disregard the battle plan he was given and implement his own. 
Finally, it was decided the problem was fundamental to БРИГАДИР's design, and he was 
deactivated, crated up, stuck in a warehouse, and forgotten... where he was lost for more 
than a decade, until, during an earthquake, an automatic threat sensor restarted his systems.

 

[BlackSpectre]

This post might help... 

 

 

[DoctorDitko]

At least some of this gets better if you pick a different font. On live, I think I renamed my favorite to match Montreal -- or whatever -- and I was one of the few who could tell the pranksters SG "Parallel Illusion" apart from each other.

I enjoyed the prank, but loved my namesake using the "light of truth" to tell them apart.

 

It's easier to change fonts now, but Cryptic did us all a disservice by picking a font that had identical capital I, lowercase L, and numeral 1.

 

I suspect the reason chat has more characters than names do is down to the database they used for *ahem* characters.

 

[srmalloy]

13 hours ago, DoctorDitko said:

I suspect the reason chat has more characters than names do is down to the database they used for *ahem* characters.

I think the restriction for character names was more to keep the names able to be easily typed by other players -- if you could name a character "Outré Girl", how many people are going to know that, to get the 'é' character, you have to hold down the 'alt' key and type '0233' on the numeric pad? Or how to type the Unicode for a character named "Черный Шпион", or using less-readily-recognizable character sets like "赤 医 忍び"? Or even be able to read the character name, to be able to type a reasonable transliteration into chat? For the Korean localization when the attempt was made to bring 'City of Hero' to Korea, I don't know (having never tried) whether there was a Korean-language-specific version of the client that would have let players create characters with names in Hangul, but that was the only foreign-language localization for the game that I know of that would have used a non-ASCII characterset if fully implemented.

[tidge]

On 8/2/2024 at 1:37 PM, LKN-351 said:

The name entry and chat entry definitely have different letter usage rules. You can use Kanji in chat but not in character names, and I know I used at least one other written language that has odd characters and it was the same situation.

I THINK I used Russian words in one of my character bios also.

 

I use Cyrillic in chat, I kinda wish I could also rename pets... but alas, the name entry won't take them.

[srmalloy]

On 8/2/2024 at 10:37 AM, LKN-351 said:

I THINK I used Russian words in one of my character bios also.

You can put any of the Unicode characters supported by the CoH font into character bios. Well, you can actually put any Unicode character into a character bio (or chat), regardless of whether or not it's supported by the font, but all you'll get is, at best, a hollow box. I have a fair number of characters with Cyrillic in their character bios. The only thing you need to remember is that Unicode has 16-bit-wide characters, so each one you use in a bio takes up two characters of the already-limited space.

[Jacke]

There's been a lot of updating of the base code of City, client and server.  Running a canonization on incoming text to make it safe is almost universal to prevent shenanigans.