by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/06/17 10:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/06/17/8611290.aspx
Microsoft program manager Garrett McGowan mentioned yesterday:
Please compile Audiosurf as a Unicode application. Surely the game isn't supported on Win9x? Around 15 percent of my music collection is unavailable in the game because the album and song metadata...
This is the site where you can read about Audiosurf.
Dag Mitchell, is there really an excuse for this kind of thing anymore?
Huge parts of the game industry have moved to Unicode, it really is unfortunate that holdovers like this still happen along.
Now lots of people have been complaining about this, like here in their forums and in blogs like this one. People have been pointing out this problem for months now, and it really is time they paid attention to the complaints....
This blog brought to you by Ｕ (U+ff35, aka FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U)
Andrew Cook on 17 Jun 2008 12:31 PM:
The problem is not with Audiosurf itself. Audiosurf is not an "application" in the traditional sense, in the same way that games on Kongregate (http://www.kongregate.com/) or in Adobe Shockwave Shockmachine (now retired) aren't applications. They instead rely on third-party engines, in this case Quest3D by Act-3D b.v. which isn't Unicode-compiled. Unfortunately, Quest3D /is/ used for Windows 9X applications -- for some reason -- so the makers of Audiosurf are stuck.
The good news is that the Unicode-as-ANSI does not appear to prevent access to any song nor break statistics in any way.
jmdesp on 18 Jun 2008 2:38 AM:
Hum, I hope that Microsoft now stand in a good position to such remarks, and that the recent version of ActiveSync are now fully unicodized, it was *really* painful to try to synchronise a japane PDA with an occidental OS with AS 3.5, and shameful too to see such a problem between two fully unicode OS.
Michael S. Kaplan on 18 Jun 2008 3:07 AM:
Actually, I have proven on many occasions that I am completely willing to criticize Microsoft products with globalization problems such as piss-poor Unicode support, too.
Flamebait denied -- and everybody screwing up support here can find themselves a target, sorry! :-)