Invisible/empty nick names

rkfg

For whatever reason I don't see some people's names. I asked others and they see them, but I see empty line in the scoreboard (badges are fine) and the name is also missing in the kill message, both in the center of the screen and in the top right corner. Their names are sometimes visible in the ingame console and log.txt (attached). One of these was "��PADLA" (http://hive.naturalselection2.com/profile/23025479), he has those two garbage symbols in his name and that's possibly the cause. I only saw his name in the console and log. I remember there were actually 4 of those symbols and they were like ½¼. I guess it has something to do with encodings and probably these symbols are actually cyrillic encoded wrong (like UTF-8 ⇒ CP1252). There was the infamous letter "Ð" which has the ASCII code of 0xd0 and it's usually about 50% of UTF-8 encoded cyrillic text.

NS2Stats also shows that garbage (http://ns2stats.com/player/player/161881). I also saw empty chat messages, it's unlikely people send empty messages just for the sake of it. I don't know whether NS2 on Windows allows entering cyrillic but on Linux it shows nothing. Maybe Windows version just cuts them out or ignores and Linux version refuses to process such a nickname at all. But it's kinda annoying. Am I the only one who encounters such issues?

rkfg

More on this issue, it seems that cyrillic input works on Windows but it's shown as garbage in game on Windows (I asked him about it) and as empty message on Linux. Though it's being logged correctly:

Chat All - 1mb0: вфмфн ьфртуь
Chat All - 1mb0: вфмфн зщьутнфуьы9

He forgot to switch layout and sent it in Russian instead of translit. The first message should be "davay mahnem" (let's exchange) and the second is "davay pomenyaems9" (basically the same as the first). It seems that Linux version filters it out completely though I'd prefer at least question marks. But it would be even better to support UTF-8 to some extent. Add cyrillic and western european chars and a great amount of people would be happy.

rkfg

Any attention, please? @IronHorse‌ ?

rkfg

Am I the only one experiencing it? Any comments from the developers? Has it been added to the bugtracker? At least read?..

Racer1

Devs are (presumably) finishing up super-secret build 265. A playtester is your best bet, but if they can't reproduce the issue, its unlikely you will get anything fixed.

rkfg

Thanks for the comment. I expected at least something from @IronHorse‌ but he seems like abandoned this forum section a while ago which is sad. To reproduce one may add a cyrillic layout and type a couple of letters in their nick or to the chat window. It will be probably filtered from the nick on Windows (I can only guess, I don't have it, but windows players likely don't have this issue) and shown as gibberish in chat. For Linux players the outcome is much worse as I described. It's quite easy to test.

rkfg

@SamusDroid‌ can you help on this one, please?

SamusDroid

Uhhhhh, just change the language to English? I wouldn't be surprised if something is broken on Linux, a lot is.

rkfg

Well, it's already set to English as well as the LANG env var. There was a lot of issues with locales on Steam for Linux start and I decided to set it to en_US.UTF-8 for Steam forever, also set English for all games and Steam interface just in case. The game doesn't support any characters outside ASCII so it's not surprising. I only want it to be reported to the devs. Probably, it isn't even the engine bug but the Lua one.

IronHorse

rkfg wrote: »

I expected at least something from @IronHorse‌ but he seems like abandoned this forum section a while ago which is sad.

I apologize, i have been back and forth out of state, and when I only have a mobile i do not bother with tech support. (too difficult to diagnose, can't open files uploaded etc)
As you are probably aware, the resources available for NS2 are very slim these days, and as a result most engine issues have a good chance of not being addressed in the future.

If it is in fact on the LUA side of things @SamusDroid‌ is incredibly effective in this area and is now aware of it, so if he is able to - regarding both capability and schedule - I am sure he will take a crack at it and let you know.

Thanks for the great documentation as always @rkfg‌

rkfg

No problem. I've been told that you're busy IRL, @IronHorse‌. It happens to the best of us sometimes. I looked into some related files like ns2/lua/GUIChat.lua, ns2/lua/GUIScoreboard.lua and ns2/lua/Chat.lua and they seem to not filter anything from the usernames. Would be handy to find a single point for both chat and scoreboard to filter nicks there once and for all.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=120940817 — here's a Windows-only solution for cyrillic chat. It won't work on Linux, tried it but I can't enter anything when switched to the Russian layout, not even gibberish. As shown on the screenshot, on Windows the cyrillic entered looks like CP1251 ⇒ CP1252 ("Привет" ⇒ "Ïðèâåò") but as I see in my log, on Linux the same text (sent from a Windows player) becomes encoded like UTF-8 ⇒ CP1252 ("Привет" ⇒ "Привет"). Respective commands I used to demonstrate it for this post:

> echo "Привет" | iconv -t cp1251 | iconv -f cp1252
Ïðèâåò
> echo "Привет" | iconv -f cp1252
Привет

Echo outputs UTF-8 which is then get decoded from a wrong encoding. This confuses me as it looks like network messages are UTF-8 encoded though the game itself doesn't support unicode. I tried printing UTF-8 (both valid and gibberish) from a local Lua console and it doesn't throw an error or anything. There are also no Lua errors in the log.txt as you can see.

I'll try to experiment with modding (I hope the editor isn't required for this particular task since it's Windows-only, unfortunately).

rkfg

No change after the update. It's been said that UTF-8 fonts support was added but without any details. I still can't type any cyrillic. Nicks with western european characters are still cut and they still cut the system message if they are mentioned there. I also saw the nick of some German guy with purposely inserted symbols with diacritics. The only ASCII symbol there was the first one, "H" IIRC, others had diacritics. The whole word was in English though, diacritics were just decorating it. Like "Höŗŝė". I only saw "H" at the scoreboard and chat (without the message body) though the ingame console showed it correctly.

rkfg

So, what's about this bug? Can CDT fix it? For example, disable completely non-ASCII symbols in the nick? It really bugs me if someone accidentally enters a cyrillic symbol somewhere in their nick, they don't see just that one symbol and I don't see anything after it. If that symbol is the first, I don't see the whole nick and it's hard to guess who they are.

Decoy

@rkfg I'll page a couple of the programmers and see what their take on it is


Edit - there's discussion now in the internal chat. We should (hopefully) get this fixed for the next patch Thanks!

IronHorse

Decoy stealing my thunder :-P
Long live the CDT!

@rkfg‌ would you mind assembling a list of all Linux known issues (with links to reproduction steps /back traces) that you care to receive attention and PM them to me? I'm currently assembling a list myself, but you are so thorough at documenting I'd be a fool not to ask you while I'm at it. Hehe

McGlaspie

This issue is already logged and known. I'll see about getting it bumped up the list an added for B267

rkfg

Many thanks for your attention, CDT people! Can't wait for it to be fixed!

@IronHorse‌ of course, there are not so many (I can think of 3 at the moment) of them but they can be pesky sometimes. I also can't tell for everyone so I'll send only those that I'm experiencing currently.