> Imagine writing a game. Everything works nice and dandy with your ASCII format and now your boss approaches you and wants to distribute the game for the asian market!
You just make sure all translated text is in UTF-8, and use Google Noto fonts for those languages. All game engines I know render UTF-8 text without problems if you supply a font that has the needed glyphs.
Source: I'm and indie game developer and have recently localized my game to Chinese. The game is a mix of RPG and roguelike, so it has a lot of text (over 10000 words). I used SDL_TTF to render text. Precisely: TTF_RenderUTF8_Blended() function. The only issue I had is with multiline/wrapped text. SDL_TTF doesn't break lines on Chinese punctuation characters (.,;:!?) so I would search+replace strings at runtime to add a regular space characters after those.
You just make sure all translated text is in UTF-8, and use Google Noto fonts for those languages. All game engines I know render UTF-8 text without problems if you supply a font that has the needed glyphs.
Source: I'm and indie game developer and have recently localized my game to Chinese. The game is a mix of RPG and roguelike, so it has a lot of text (over 10000 words). I used SDL_TTF to render text. Precisely: TTF_RenderUTF8_Blended() function. The only issue I had is with multiline/wrapped text. SDL_TTF doesn't break lines on Chinese punctuation characters (.,;:!?) so I would search+replace strings at runtime to add a regular space characters after those.