PlaneShift

Gameplay => General Discussion => Topic started by: FlippySeal on April 19, 2004, 10:12:22 pm

Title: Special characters... why not??
Post by: FlippySeal on April 19, 2004, 10:12:22 pm: Why can\'t people use special characters? Well, actually I haven\'t checked for the specific characters I want to use
(?, ?). But why not, there are several Anglo-Saxon names i would like to use, for example ??elhun, Ber?un, and ??elfrid. Why can\'t I use those characters?
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Post by: AendarCallenlasse on April 19, 2004, 10:14:17 pm: Well for one...you would get people creating leet names and all with the special characters. Which would counter-act the roleplaying atmosphere.

But since the game has no anglo-saxon roots, feel free to pick a fantasy name with regular characters :)
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Post by: Kiva on April 19, 2004, 10:16:26 pm: This is mainly to prevent l33t-speak names and that those names aren\'t really fantasy, they\'re just copied from history books, etc. Besides, it would create problems with people using /tell ingame as I doubt many people know how to write all those ascii characters, and it would most likely also mess up the character database as I doubt that those two, and at least a few other special characters, are supported by MySQL. :)

You spend too much time on the boards Aendar. -_-
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Post by: FlippySeal on April 19, 2004, 10:18:07 pm: I can never think of good names though, oh well i can always get names off other ppl :) Oh BTW this game has such a great community, everyone here is so helpful and clean :)
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Post by: Mivus on April 19, 2004, 10:18:43 pm: I don\'t to see the point of a name that\'s hard pronounce. =) Yet if you feel the need to, you should make whatever kind of name you wish. ;D
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Post by: dfryer on April 19, 2004, 10:24:03 pm: You could always substitute ordinary-character combinations for special characters - \"e\" or \"ae\" often works for the \"AE\" ligature, and the crossed-d - well, I dunno, dh, dth, th? I don\'t really know what sound it makes. Umlauts can usually be represented by appending an e - oe, ue etc.

This also makes names more easily converted to a mental \"sound\" if people know what sounds the characters make.
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Post by: FlippySeal on April 19, 2004, 10:29:31 pm: I agree with you in theory.... although in theory communism works :( ??!!
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Post by: Moogie on April 19, 2004, 10:46:24 pm: Personally I\'m glad special characters are not allowed... I don\'t even know how to type them. :P
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Post by: dfryer on April 19, 2004, 10:54:51 pm: Communism works in theory if you start with the assumption that communism works. My econ prof said - if it doesn\'t work in practice, then it\'s probably bad theory.

I\'ve never learned how to type special characters under windows.. Macs have the \"option\" key which can be used for many special characters.

Using ordinary ASCII characters makes it easier to anticipate the kind of input used, and ensures cross platform compatibility (unless everything is moved to Unicode strings, not sure how difficult that would be).
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Post by: Mage of Darkness on April 19, 2004, 11:48:11 pm: lol mogura its not hard you hold alt and type in usually a three digit code on your number pad a couple of them are at this site if you wanna know firehotquotes.bolt.com/altcodes/fhqalt.html (http://www.firehotquotes.bolt.com/altcodes/fhqalt.html) 8)
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Post by: Moogie on April 20, 2004, 12:03:43 am: I don\'t want to have to learn a bunch of codes just to type a few people\'s names... besides, there\'s still the problem of \"how the hell do you pronounce that?\" :)
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Post by: DepthBlade on April 20, 2004, 12:23:36 am: Yah I wouldn\'t mind having a special character for the first letter of my characters name just to give it that touch! But I have to agree with mogura it would be hard to contact people like buddy chat and stuff and trying to figure out the right characters in their name. Also it does take away from the whole role playing atmosphere like Aendar says!

Personally I could care less, to me special characters are always found in FPS game names especially delta force for some reason :]
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Post by: Cirque on April 20, 2004, 06:13:11 am: I think leet speak names or names with a jumble of both numbers and letters can get annoying and ruin the games RPG atmosphere, but names that incorperate alt codes should be able to sneak in. While there is the argument that people would abuse this it would be nice to see French or German names for example. By this I mean names that require those symbols above letters (I cant remember what theyre called so feel free to remind me). This would add some diversity to the names and give it a more cultural feel.
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Post by: FlippySeal on April 20, 2004, 02:59:33 pm: For the french, it\'s accent aigue, accent circonflex, and the other on i can\'t remember i\'m bilingual :) (and my German is coming along :D!
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Post by: zinder on April 20, 2004, 03:17:39 pm: AFAIK the the two dots of german umlauts dont have a name. The umlauts are their own characters, like an a or a b.
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Post by: KwartzTheKran on April 20, 2004, 03:23:32 pm: it also stops the frustration of people having similar names and variants of the same name... (how many sephiroths do we have atm? ;)
we would have even more but with special chars replacing the normal letters.
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Post by: kixoras1 on April 20, 2004, 04:12:38 pm: well the problem with typing the name over and over again could be to have a personal talking system like fairyland. in that game there is a special menu where if you have a buddy all you have to do is type it once then right select the name and talk in wisper mode. seems VERY effective to me. as for having too many characters it isnt too hard to restrict the characters. there are some that look good in names for pronunciation. so limit to about 19 and you can have some nice looking names taht arent l33t.