help on putting Japanese text in stepmania

[bmah]

I have a bit of a problem when adding Japanese text to Stepmania. Some Japanese characters, for some reason, can't be recognized by Stepmania. Here's an example:

This picture is the .sm file in notepad, saved in UTF-8 encoding:




Next picture is what shows up in Stepmania:





How come Stepmania doesn't recognize that character? How do you fix it? Thanks in advance.

[BemaniJhoto 7.5]

There can be many reasons to this:

1) The people at StepMania only decided to put the most commonly used kanji seen mostly in DDR games and popular titles, ignoring the other characters completely.

2) The people at StepMania didn't want a big installation file just because of implementing an entire kanji set.

or

3) The people at StepMania just bothered to only put in 1st to 2nd grade kanji on the installation files for size purposes...again.

That's why I stick to themes like CyberiaStyle; they have full kanji sets in them...about over 20 files of them.

[bmah]

Sticking with Stepmania, is it just better to put in the English names? For example, 猫叉Master as in Nekomata Master (I don't really know what op.31 叙情 means though).

[BemaniJhoto 7.5]

Originally Posted by bmah

Sticking with Stepmania, is it just better to put in the English names? For example, 猫叉Master as in Nekomata Master (I don't really know what op.31 叙情 means though).

I can PM you a download like to every kanji file I have from CyberiaStyle...but I'll have to do that tomorrow. 135a in the morning and no HDD holds me back.

[Azure Haights]

This is exactly why I figure the devs should do one of two things:

Originally Posted by BemaniJhoto 7.5

There can be many reasons to this:

1) The people at StepMania only decided to put the most commonly used kanji seen mostly in DDR games and popular titles, ignoring the other characters completely.

Show how they render japanese text (they already link to LMNOpc's font builder for rendering the regular character set), and maybe provide a link or identification to the font they use for foreign characters to keep the look consistent...

2) The people at StepMania didn't want a big installation file just because of implementing an entire kanji set.

or

3) The people at StepMania just bothered to only put in 1st to 2nd grade kanji on the installation files for size purposes...again.

...or really trim down the included kanji/hangul/special characters, and make the rest available as expansion packs. I know that'd cut the potential of alphas released just to accomodate TM/OSC/what have you.

[kannazuki]

I believe there's another way to do this by making a .png file with the special characters that you want displayed... like this. *takes screencap of one of the official sims that has this*




Slightly more time consuming, but at least you're guaranteed that it shows on every system all the time.

[TougaKiryuu]

I answered this already:

In the /DATA directory of Stepmania, there's a file called "Translations.dat" that has all the valid translations in it, you need to put that specific translation in there, then give it the tag that translation has in the SM file (examples are in the dat file)

[bmah]

Yes, I've did that, but as you saw in my first post, some characters aren't showing up properly. I guess the reason is because some of the Japanese characters I have aren't valid or something.

BTW, PMed you back, BemaniJhoto.


edit: that png method seems interesting. I'll have to check that out too. ^_^

[UnrealArcher]

I believe the .png method only works for DWI files, though.

[AJ 187]

Okay let's set the record straight:

Originally Posted by BemaniJhoto 7.5

1) The people at StepMania only decided to put the most commonly used kanji seen mostly in DDR games and popular titles, ignoring the other characters completely.

Glenn (who afaik has always handled the kanji), takes characters from multiple places:

1. DDR series, as expected
2. Tournamix
3. Some StepMania fanmixes (like foonmix)

Originally Posted by bmah

Sticking with Stepmania, is it just better to put in the English names? For example, 猫叉Master as in Nekomata Master (I don't really know what op.31 叙情 means though).

This is where the Transliteration fields come in:

#TITLETRANSLIT:;
#SUBTITLETRANSLIT:;
#ARTISTTRANSLIT:;

Originally Posted by Azure Haights

This is exactly why I figure the devs should do one of two things:
Show how they render japanese text (they already link to LMNOpc's font builder for rendering the regular character set), and maybe provide a link or identification to the font they use for foreign characters to keep the look consistent...

Grab this:
http://kki.ajworld.net/Font_generation.rar

The key to generating Japanese character files is in the Javascript file.
As a comment says in there:

/* We can't send Unicode into the font ourself for some reason.  So, we have to
 * store prototypes for each font page.  These should just be PSD files that contain
 * a single text layer with the characters we want.  The orientation, font, etc.
 * don't matter; they'll be overridden. */

The font used is MS Gothic.

[bmah]

OK, that's what I'm missing, putting the Transliteration fields in the .sm itself. I only followed the instructions in the Translation.dat file.
I assume that you're supposed to put in the Japanese characters in the Transliteration fields then, right?

[TougaKiryuu]

yep.

5char

[AJ 187]

No. The Japanese characters go in the main fields, and the translation goes in the Transliteration section.

[Wan]

EDIT: Since my PS is in Spanish, the "scripts" menu has a different name. ^^;

EDIT2: How do I generate a full charset? the script only generates kanji1-kanji4 O.o

[Azure Haights]

Originally Posted by AJ187

about fonts

...and of course it's a photoshop script, and all I have is Gimp.