ひらがな、カタカナ! Yes, you read correctly... (Japanese text for BGE)

Game Engine Game Engine Resources
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I had been thinking about the idea of non-English text in the BGE for a while now, and recently I made a first attempt of it when I made some Arabic text (I haven’t published those yet). The Arabic font turned out well, so I decided to try a few more non-English fonts, which led to the following…

Japanese Text Support for BGE
Everyone knows that Japan and video games go together like a hand and a glove, so it’s only fitting that I present you with these eight Japanese fonts for the Blender Game Engine.

http://www.blendenzo.com/Images/JapaneseFontPack.jpg

(The fonts are not black and white only. Just change the material color to anything you want.)

Featured are:

Ex Hiragana Damaged
Ex Hiragana Opaque
Ex Katakana Damaged
Ex Katakana Opaque
Kochi Gothic Hiragana
Kochi Gothic Katakana
Kochi Mincho Hiragana
Kochi Mincho Katakana

The “Ex” series fonts are from www.vicfieger.com. You can find a great selection of other free fonts there. The “Kochi” series fonts came with my Linux distribution (I use an Ubuntu/Mint combo).

Legal Stuff
All of these fonts were created in the United States from fonts which I am licensed to use. The United States does not allow bitmap text to be copyrighted, so all of these fonts (which I generated) are in the public domain of the United States, free for all uses commercial and non-commercial. No attribution is necessary, and you do not need further permission to use them freely.

Technical Stuff
The Japanese Hiragana and Katakana normally occupy the unicode space beginning at 3041 hexadecimal and 30A1 hexadecimal respectively. However, FTBlender will not render those spaces, so I moved each set to begin at 0021 hexadecimal (the beginning of the basic Latin character set, which is used by English). To use text that has been written in Japanese, you must shift each character’s hexadecimal value by -3020 hexadecimal or -3080 hexadecimal, depending on which character set it was typed in (hiragana or katakana). It would probably be easy to do this using a script, but I have not written one to do it.

Also, the included .blend files are set up to print LTR Japanese, since I understand that LTR is the text direction in common use for horizontal writing in Japan. To print RTL Japanese, follow these steps:

  • Flip the normals on the text plane (Go to Edit Mode, press W key for Specials and select “Flip Normals”)
  • Exit Edit Mode and rotate the plane by 180 degrees on the local Y-axis (Press R key for Rotate, press Y key twice for Local-Y Constraint, type 180 on the numeric keypad, press Enter)
  • Enter Face Mode and mirror the UV mapping in the UV editor along the X-axis (Press F Key for Face Mode, move mouse over UV Editor and press M Key, select X-axis from the popup menu)The Download

http://www.blendenzo.com/Files/JapaneseFontPack.zip (798 kb ZIP archive)

Enjoy! If time permits, I’ll make a little keyboard program that will aid in the process of typing text using these fonts.

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japanese language looks cool :slight_smile:

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wow! cool, now I can make a new matrix intro for my game :smiley:

EDIT: Huston we have a problem :frowning: please see my link below

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i’m curious , what does

ひらがな、カタカナ!

mean ?
:smiley:

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It’s Japanese (you might not be able to see it correctly if you don’t have the correct fonts installed), and it means “Hiragana, Katakana!” Those are the two writing styles that are commonly used in Japan, and my font set includes four of each. Katakana is simpler, and hiragana is more complex. It’s kind of like the difference between printed handwriting and cursive script.

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Do you need the windows language packs installed for this to work? I can see Japanese fonts in explorer and firefox.

I can only see one figure on all the planes.

http://aycu39.webshots.com/image/31838/2001621440434282976_rs.jpg

http://aycu18.webshots.com/image/33097/2001637745246244519_rs.jpg

Some of the planes have the pink “no texture material” on them, Did you pack the textures?

http://aycu04.webshots.com/image/32883/2001621671223092289_rs.jpg

Look in the file menu, and press the Pack data button to pack the data inside the .blend file. That way you will not need to include the TGA folder with it.

The font bitmaps look really neat, wish I could get them working :frowning: I want to make a cool matrix like intro for a game :frowning:

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No, you don’t need the language packs installed to see the fonts in Blender. Anyway, if you can see Japanese in your web browser, then you already do have the language packs installed. (On my computer at work I can’t see the Japanese in the title of this thread… just a bunch of question marks.)

Just for the sake of clarity, these Japanese Blender fonts are actually mapped to the standard English font positions (starting with 0021, which is the English exclamation point, and ending with 007E, which is some less used punctuation mark that I can’t remember currently.) Typing English letters in the Text property should cause Japanese text to display on screen.

I don’t understand why that is happening. I’ve tested these in Blender 2.43, 2.44, and 2.45 (which is the version you are using), and they all work fine. I’ve had the “@” bug before (it was a big problem for me in 2.41 and 2.42a on Windows), and in the past I’ve always been able to fix it by saving the file, closing Blender, and re-opening the file. I’m not sure if this will work for you, though, since the @ bug usually only occurs when you first map a font.

Yes, I did pack the textures. Just to be sure, I downloaded the package to a different location than they were created in (to destroy any possible re-establishing of relative paths) and tried them all. Every one had its texture. Also, the text blends are about 120 kb without their textures packed, but each file is showing a size between 165kb and 190kb, which means that they are each holding an image.

If you’re still having trouble with this, just select the image that should be mapped to the plane in the UV editor and try “Image > Reload” first. If this doesn’t work, use “Image > Replace” and select the TGA from the TGAs folder. It should load it in in place of the one it’s not finding.

I included the extra, un-packed TGA files in case someone wanted to map the fonts themselves, or if they wanted to alter them in the GIMP (to add glow or metallic gradients or something). It didn’t seem to add too much to the filesize, so I think I’ll leave them in.

I really hope you are able to get them working, too. I think your matrix idea sounds neat, and I’m looking forward to seeing it. If you’re still having trouble, could you try the fonts on Windows and Linux and try a couple of different Blender versions? I’d really like to try to track down what is causing this problem.

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ありがと；」
but who will make a Japanese game here ;p

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Also, for those of you looking to translate jap text to english:
http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=ja|en

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Wow, Thanks a bundle blendenzo. They worked great on my computer. Of all the things my computer can’t run, I’m surprised it worked was well as it does. =P

Blendenzo, I hate to be a pain… but could you make this for Blender 2.42a too, It’s really nice.

but who will make a Japanese game here ;p

TONS of people. I know I will.

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thanks for putting this up Blendenzo!

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Do not trust that translator! You will get a ‘Rated A for Adult’ of the Japanese ESRB :p.

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AO in the JAPANESE ESRB? that’d be pretty hard to do :stuck_out_tongue:

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I thought it would b easy for Japanese content to get rated R.

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Cool!! thanks for sharing.

Also,To translate (a few) English word to hiragana/katakana( or roma-ji) ,you can use this.
Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC Server:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi

thanks.

16

cool work enzo :slight_smile:

and recently I made a first attempt of it when I made some Arabic text (I haven’t published those yet). The Arabic font turned out well,

sorry but the arabic language didn’t work <that blend you gave me> , here is how it must be and how it appeared , thanks in all cases :o , thanks …

btw , it’s my name :smiley:

edit :- if i’m not too clear , the blend file font, it didn’t connect the letters …

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