mr_kent
Enchanter
Joined: 10 Oct 2000
Posts: 698
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 Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 4:19 am
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Because the development tools I use do not fully support Unicode, and the custom screen-scrolling component used in zMUD would have to be re-written from scratch.
zMUD does not support multi-byte Unicode languages, and never will, sorry.
Delphi programs are notoriously poor at supporting Unicode, as I found when writing zMUD. While the newer Delphi 7 is better, I'm not sure how "Unicode-ready" some of the 3rd party components are that I'm using.
The real problem with this is testing. I certainly can't test Unicode support myself because I don't have any machines that use double-byte languages and can't read Chinese or Japanese.
zMUD is written in Delphi and was originally written for Windows 3.1 way back in 1995. Back then, nothing supported unicode, not even Windows. Over the years, Delphi finally added Unicode support (fully in Delphi 5), which was a couple of years ago. However, by then, much of low-level sections of zMUD had already been written. In particular, the scrolling MUD output display only stores one byte per character. Converting this to support Unicode would be a major task.
So, yes, Unicode *is* very difficult to implement, once code has been written before unicode existed. Some of us old-time programmers are just used to treating strings as byte-arrays, and end up doing lots of stuff for speed and efficiency that just doesn't work with unicode. Between the screen display, the trigger pattern matching, the script parsing, etc, there are lots and lots of places where unicode would have to be added.
So, I'm afraid that at this point, it's probably never going to happen. Sorry.
- Zugg (from various posts and different times)
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