Quote:Original post by iaminternets
I'm trying to ensure that the chat feature of my game will work with any language. Should I not use C++ to deal with text?

I would think that a chat program isn't going to do much parsing of content, so C++ and std::string is ideal.

Your problem will be rendering and input methods. How are you going to handle right-to-left rendering with liasons and positional significance (eg. Arabic) or compound rendering (eg. Hangul)? How about mixed language?

Your choice of text rendering library and input method library are far more important that what language you're going to use to send and receive null-terminated sequences of bytes.

Quote:Original post by Bregma
compound rendering (eg. Hangul)

Just FYI, the vast majority (all?) of Korean IMEs output pre-composed Hangul. You only need to use the decomposed form for Old-Hangul, which is basically an historic script.

That being said, you'll still need to be able to handle decomposed base + combining character combinations if you want to support, say, Vietnamese. The hardest part of this is not so much the rendering (which is pretty much automatic if you're using Win32) but supporting proper cursor movement and selection (i.e. press the right key just once jumps over multiple codepoints). Again, if you're using regular Win32 (i.e. an INPUT control) that stuff is handled automatically. If you're writing your own GUI, it's going to be a lot of work (interfacing with IMEs is no simple task, either).