Japanese in an RPG?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Josh" == Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> writes:

    Josh> We use Python to handle the dialogues, so any solution that
    Josh> we adopt would have to be OK with Python.

You need to require Python 2.  Python 1.5 doesn't deal well at all
with I18N.  Python 1.6 wasn't out long enough to be worth dealing with
it.

    Josh> What do you guys think? Does Unicode work? I really know
    Josh> very little about it, other than it is not widely used.

For this purpose, it works fine.  I forget what the correct term is,
but python deals with character set translation via plugin modules.
So you need to find out what those modules are, detect that they
aren't present, and give the user a warning message if they request an
unsupported language/encoding.  Here's the way you do it:

            ASCII msg               Unicode msg             EUC msg
RPG engine -----------> RPG client -------------> eucJP.py ---------> user
 database                database                   table
                         (gettext)

Don't take the "eucJP.py" seriously, it's almost surely called
something else (and might even be an .so).

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