Djolaf

 

Hired Hero
mechanized madness
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posted February 10, 2021 01:45 AM |
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Edited by Djolaf at 03:45, 10 Feb 2021.
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heroes 3 complete/hota fonts and foreign language characters
Upon installing and starting Horn of the Abyss, you can notice that the fonts are all different. Why is that? Who should know this?
My first assumption is that this is the official font of the localized Russian version, which is different, but contains Russian Cyrillic characters. This font looks quite different, as you can see when you start a map:



It is smaller and doesn't seem to have any shadows. For some reason, original bigfont = HotA medfont. To me, it doesn't seem very fitting for a fantasy environment. It might be more readable and since HotA is the main multiplayer version now, it makes me wonder if this makes people read text faster, or something?
When I play campaigns, I like to get immersed as much as possible into this fantasy world. Even the font matters to me, so I figured that replacing the new fonts in hota.lod would fix the problem. Now I realized that this font looks a lot like Times New Roman, only shoved into a bitmap , but it still looks better to me. I also had one tiny problem in the epilogue of Terror of the Tides campaign:


This brings the 2nd question - How are foreign languages displayed in Heroes3?
I guess H3 is limited to the technology of its time and it only uses ASCII, so it is limited to 256 characters. The characters are more or less the same as original ASCII characters, which include some west-european characters. We don't have Polish or Russian, so for those, some changes had to be made.

In HotA, we have the full Russian alphabet in the end part of ASCII, replacing the west-European accented Latin characters. I guess the game is told to check those parts of the font and use those characters for displaying Russian. I am not sure if OS language settings affect this, but now, I can read Russian maps and Russian lobby online. I can't type Russian though, I only get question marks. Maybe it's because I am using an English version of the game?

Thank you everyone for your help!
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forged in the forge
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