The Tain

It would be a lot of work to implement, and a crazy amount of work to do properly (i.e. actually support input methods for languages like Chinese - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method).

I see, I don't suppose it would be more doable if Myth were made to use a form of alternate font tag system? So that instead of a font tag affecting certain dialogs, there are multiple font tags that affect certain dialogs created under specific language pack. If this user has this specific setting/tag it uses font 2 rather than font 1 as its default. And anybody else who has a different default would still see font 2 as font 2 while their font 1 as font 1. Similar to how a chat message can keep their format, maybe a type of fake format that tells the client which font tag it used.

Basically, slightly modified font tags included in the interface plugs or even language addons with one telling the game which is the default for this specific user.

If that much of work is to be done, might as well do it properly via Unicode rather than a custom Myth-specific system.

However, I agree that this deserved some thought. Especially if we somehow manage to get the rights and wish to actually distribute Myth in other languages.

Also, I just found this enum in the Myth code, which may suggest the different localizations of Myth that were made:

_country_usa,
_country_uk,
_country_japan,
_country_germany,
_country_france,
_country_argentina,
_country_brazil,
_country_italy,
_country_spain,
_country_south_africa,
_country_middle_east,
_country_austrailia,
_country_taiwan,
_country_korea,
_country_russia,
NUMBER_OF_COUNTRY_CODES

EDIT: I think if we ever consider doing this (adding Myth unicode support), we'd definitely want to test if the original localized versions of the game still work with our changes - which would require finding all such copies (as Pyro has been doing).

I know there were metaserver rooms that had country names as well as flags on the banner. I would wager that they were a way to separate people from different countries within their own rooms rather than unique localizations of them. Perhaps not implemented, but some way to group players with others that might understand them and play in the same timezones. Maybe Bnet separated player via their IP. I say this because, from what I've been able to gather, some of the localizations were simply never made. There is no official Russian TFL nor M2. There were Spanish and Italian TFLs but not M2s. There was a Korean TFL and M2, but from what I was told only their boxes and manuals were in Korean. The actual game remained English. I don't think there are other official localizations of TFL and M2 out there, but it is hard to say since no one place lists them all.

I asked someone who has a japanese M2 how he types in japanese in the game. For some reason I though he could, but he can't. The font tags allow them to have japanese characters (for the interface, etc) but of course does not allow them to type them.

Interesting.