Unicode

Hey,

doesn't seem this area editor forum is used much. But I'll behave by posting here :)

Ahem...

I'm currently porting Quickmud (ROM) to the German language and, naturally, there are problems with Unicode.
To shorten things, MUSHclient works fine with Nick's LUA script posted elsewhere here (if I remember right, it was written to make MC understand russian.)
But, alas! Using native characters in my areas renders the area editor useless because he does not understand it and spits out funny chars. Which isn't funny at all, since I favour the editor over OLC.

Is there any way to teach it unicode? Is it possible to compile the source under Linux?

I think it is quite hard to change it to Unicode. It was originally compiled as non-Unicode, and experience tells me that fixing that is very time-consuming and difficult. The problem is that Windows "under the hood" chooses Unicode or non-Unicode dialog boxes etc. based on the application type. To see Unicode you need to have Unicode dialog boxes, which it won't do right now.

Even MUSHclient isn't really Unicode, but since I hand-draw the output window (so to speak) I can use the Unicode drawing routines there if needed.

As for compiling under Linux, no, sorry. You can try, of course. But it was compiled using the MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) libraries which do not come with Linux. I tried recompiling MUSHclient a while back using g++ and hit thousands of compiler errors and incompatibilities.

Even the area file format has changed (if you are using SmaugFUSS, which you are not). However the changed format is easier to edit "by eye" if you wanted to stick to manually editing area files in a Unicode-friendly text editor.

Failing that, you could still use the Area Editor to do things like link rooms together, that sort of stuff. I don't think it will corrupt the Unicode (the UTF-8 I presume you are using) but am not absolutely sure. I would test on a small file first.

Too bad! Thanks, Nick.