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Instructor
Original Poster
#1 Old 12th Jun 2020 at 10:33 PM
Default Game not recognizing various letters
Hi I'm back, I thought I'd post a new thread since it isn't really the same as my other.

I've finished my name mod and put it in game and a bunch of letters show as _ instead of the letter. This includes things like ā ē ī ū č ģ ķ ļ ņ š ž ą ę į ų ė ć ł ă ș ț Ğ İ and some others, but things like å ä ö á é í ó ú are showing up fine.

My name list includes names from 31 different countries/ethnicities so there's a lot of odd letters and after all the work I've put into making the list I really want to keep them all but I need all the letters to work.

I tried playing around with the encoding (UTF-8 is the default notepad has), I tried changing the in-game font (something i saw from a different post), nothing seems to be working. I really want to get them to work, I'm open to any suggestions.
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Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#2 Old 13th Jun 2020 at 12:22 PM
Heya!

Hrm utf_8 should do the trick. That's also because of the fact that the UI uses bits of HTML and CSS, which is pretty much made with a UTF-8 encoding. Now this is what the game supports as encoding if you're curious:

         20127,
        "ascii",
        "us_ascii",
        "us",
        "ansi_x3.4_1968",
        "ansi_x3.4_1986",
        "cp367",
        "csascii",
        "ibm367",
        "iso_ir_6",
        "iso646_us",
        "iso_646.irv:1991",
        65000,
        "utf_7",
        "csunicode11utf7",
        "unicode_1_1_utf_7",
        "unicode_2_0_utf_7",
        "x_unicode_1_1_utf_7",
        "x_unicode_2_0_utf_7",
        65001,
        "utf_8",
        "unicode_1_1_utf_8",
        "unicode_2_0_utf_8",
        "x_unicode_1_1_utf_8",
        "x_unicode_2_0_utf_8",
        1200,
        "utf_16",
        "UTF_16LE",
        "ucs_2",
        "unicode",
        "iso_10646_ucs2",
        1201,
        "unicodefffe",
        "utf_16be",
        12000,
        "utf_32",
        "UTF_32LE",
        "ucs_4",
        12001,
        "UTF_32BE",
        28591,
        "iso_8859_1",
        "latin1"

But there's a difference between "Encoding" and "Supported languages". So what I THINK is happening (and we apply that same method to web development) is that the English STBL only supports characters that appears in the english language. (so: å ä ö á é í ó ú ). I think with another language you actually would have access to those other characters that aren't showing up yet.

Now, one way to really check whether it's actually a language issue, is to use the utf-8 code of that particular letter (so ł would become: \xC5\x82)
(See: https://mothereff.in/utf-8#%C4%81%2...%C4%9E%20%C4%B0)

Here's a great tutorial to also see which STBL resource is for which language: http://modthesims.info/t/570244

Hope this helps!
Instructor
Original Poster
#3 Old 13th Jun 2020 at 5:30 PM Last edited by CASnarl : 13th Jun 2020 at 8:47 PM.
Hmm...is there a way to tell which language STBLs would support which characters? I think setting Polish will take care of the ć ł and Czech for č but some of those letters come from Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Turkish, which aren't there. Can I just not have those?

EDIT: or if I did the UTF-8 codes would I just replace those letters with the codes in my name lists?
RE EDIT: ^ Doing that won't work, the game just yells at me for there being / in the name
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#4 Old 14th Jun 2020 at 1:44 PM
Quote: Originally posted by CASnarl
Hmm...is there a way to tell which language STBLs would support which characters? I think setting Polish will take care of the ć ł and Czech for č but some of those letters come from Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Turkish, which aren't there. Can I just not have those?

EDIT: or if I did the UTF-8 codes would I just replace those letters with the codes in my name lists?
RE EDIT: ^ Doing that won't work, the game just yells at me for there being / in the name
I'd indeed add the codes in the STBL if possible  Just out of curiosity, when you say "my game yells at me" do you mean like it throws errors? Or are you trying to add the codes directly in a dialogue box where you can type the names? Because doing it directly in-game won't work as it also doesn't have a way to convert it to the actual character that you want it to be  When it's pulling it from the STBL, I think it does.

I'm honestly not too sure how the game does the whole language control, but given this tutorial: https://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2013/...e-language.html I think it really just goes off on what language your computer is in and then using the language characters for those (so those are all controlled by the computer, not the game itself ). Now the game of course choosing the STBL depending on which language the game is in, is probably even more on an engine level, so there's not that much we can do to trick the game into thinking that those characters are valid characters :/

I do want to give something a try though! Just to think with you  
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#5 Old 14th Jun 2020 at 2:16 PM
So usually for testing Unicode stuff, I usually go off this table: https://www.utf8-chartable.de/unico...icodeinhtml=dec

Now, when doing that stuff in the STBL strings, it does indeed appear 'hardcoded' as you mentioned. though, instead of the character appearing like a box, it seems to turn into this one: _

So the fact that it does _, which lead me to think "maybe it's the font". So I checked that out by going into in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin\Resources" and installing the fonts (since the game just uses that font without it being actively installed on your machine) and checking it in InDesign. From there, I found out that Ĉ (as well as the other characters that aren't working) is not supported by the font that the game uses. Which probably means why it changes it to a _. 

Thus probably the best thing to do here is either override the font itself with another font that supports it like "myriad pro" or "arial" (so the more internationally developed fonts). 
Instructor
Original Poster
#6 Old 14th Jun 2020 at 6:07 PM Last edited by CASnarl : 14th Jun 2020 at 10:41 PM. Reason: update
I replaced the names in the STBL and then went into CAS and was just randomizing the name and when it got to one of the names a box popped up saying you couldn't have names with / in them. I hadn't even typed anything at all.

I've got some time today so I'll play around with the font and see if Myriad Pro or Arial fixes it, and will edit this post with my findings.


EDIT/UPDATE: I changed the game's font to Arial (haven't tried Myriad Pro yet but I expect the same result) and no luck, not to mention it's made it harder to read
Still getting _ instead of various letters, like here's just an example screenshot where the randomized name should be Gülşen Živković but the ş and the ć are gone. There's still all those other letters I mentioned before but here's just a single example.

I'm starting to just think they are letters the game doesn't know how to produce because the game was never in the languages that use them, or if it's just my English/American game that can't.
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