Localization questions...

[JSorrentino]

Hi all, I am getting near the end of my development of a soon-to-be-released game.

I have currently implemented basic localization support with NGUI (Unity4.3.4), so everything is currently using NGUI localization for English.

I understand the process and how localization works (vaguely, i guess).

I know I can purchase / acquire fonts that support multiple languages, presume that I can export the font to a bitmap atlas for use in NGUI.  I'm having some trouble with languages like Japanese and Russian, for instance.

Is it possible to use a single font and export the fontmap that will support all languages?

I'm developing for mobile, so this is a consideration.

Is there another way of doing this with NGUI, or am I understanding how this works properly?

Font->BMFONT->atlas addition->select same font everywhere?  Do I need to have multiple font maps?  Some insight would be helpful, and couldn't think of a better spot to ask..

Thanks!

[ArenMook]

The best way to make it easy to support multiple languages is to use dynamic fonts. If you want to use bitmap fonts and have those support multiple languages, you can expect the fonts to take up a lot of texture memory. Especially if you're aiming to support eastern fonts.

But if you want to support Latin fonts, then it's not so bad. As long as the font itself has the proper characters in them, you can export them using BMFont by selecting multiple char sets. Arial has everything for example.

[JSorrentino]

OK, perfect, now to read up on the Dynamic Fonts, as I've just upgraded to pro 4.3.4 recently.

Thanks, again, Aren.  Help is greatly appreciated.

[JSorrentino]

OK, Dynamic fonts work great - easier to change to than expected.

Now, I'm learning how to support the glyphs needed for the different languages we plan to support.

US-English / European languages are simple, all can be handled with a single font.  Japanese, Russian, etc. will (so it looks) require separate ttf fonts.

How do you do font swapping (dynamic fonts) based on language?  Sorry for my ignorance, I'm new to this much in-depth localization.  As I'm using a Dynamic font now, atlas swapping doesn't seem to apply, any examples or docs on how to to this properly.

And for everyone, this release is planned for the 3 (iOS / Android / W8) main mobile markets.  Later a webplayer for facebook, etc.  What languages would you recommend to be sure to support, aside from English, Russian, Japanese, and the major European languages?

Thanks, again!

EDIT: So some of my Google digging shows that there are fonts available that encompass most of the necessary (and all) that I would deem necessary.  Size of these fonts is 7-13mb.  A bit much.  Not sure if individual fonts for specific languages is the better route or just use a very inclusive unicode font.

[ArenMook]

Currently if you try to make a label use a UIFont that's referencing a dynamic font, it will automatically use its dynamic font instead and ignore the UIFont assignment.

After some consideration I've decided that it is indeed a good idea to keep label references to dynamic font-using UIFonts for the sake of being able to easily swap TTFs.

You will be able to do this in the next update.

[JSorrentino]

Thanks again.  After your reply to another message, things got cleared up.  Thought I was missing something.

So your reply here, do you mean that you will allow reference fonts to work with dynamic fonts in the update? Just trying to be clear.

[ArenMook]

Yup.

So if you didn't want to have one giant TTF file, you could use one TTF for one set of languages, and another TTF for another.

[JSorrentino]

Yep, makes perfect sense.  Allowing Dynamic fonts in the font atlas makes it simple.

[ArenMook]

Dynamic fonts being a part of an atlas is a different topic altogether. In the next update you only will be able to keep UIFont references on the label that happen to be using dynamic fonts.

[JSorrentino]

OK, makes sense now, change object that's referenced.  Thanks again for the quick response and update too.