Naming of assets

[Paul_Bert]

I don't want to come accross as negative with developers who spend many hours developing outstanding assets for Trainz.

I have noticed within the past year or so that there are increasing numbers of asset names that look like the following:

????????? ????????? ?????? (??????? ?????????)
????????? ????????? ?????? (???????? ?????????)
????????? ????????? ?????? (???????? ?????????)

These are actual names of recently submited assets. I have stripped off the kuid numbers, but in fact the above lines represent three individual assets recently posted to the DLS. There is also nothing in the description that would tend to shed light on what these assets are or do.

Am I missing something here or is my computer secretly replacing letters with question marks. Maybe I am missing my decoder ring.

A few more examples:

zx-????????? ???1
zx-????????? ???2
zx-???????????? ?????2
zx-????????????? ??????
???? ?????? ???3

 

[cascaderailroad]

Maybe they don't know what to name it, or "kant speel" ?

It surely is a "Cracker Jack" suprise package with no photo.

Maybe you could download all of the creators assets, by searching: Username ... then if you don't care for the asset ... delete it.

My SpeelChucker iz defiantly busted

 

[WindWalkr]

I have noticed within the past year or so that there are increasing numbers of asset names that look like the following:

????????? ????????? ?????? (??????? ?????????)
????????? ????????? ?????? (???????? ?????????)
????????? ????????? ?????? (???????? ?????????)

My first guess would be that you're looking at some non-English characters which your computer doesn't have appropriate fonts for. Of course it's also possible that somebody really likes question marks, but that seems less likely.

chris

 

[JCitron]

These could be foreign assets that use non-Western characters such as Russian, Cyrillic, or Arabic, which will do something like this if the font is not supported. Question marks are part of the upper 128 ASCII characters, giving the total number of accessible characters up to 255.

I'm not sure if CM and Trainz its self supports UT-8 or some of the other internationally supported fonts systems that have all of the characters built into the font outlines. This would definitely solve the problem because any language can automatically be displayed without issue.

John

 

[JCitron]

My first guess would be that you're looking at some non-English characters which your computer doesn't have appropriate fonts for. Of course it's also possible that somebody really likes question marks, but that seems less likely.

chris

@Chris,

You beat me to the typing. I was saying the same thing.

John

 

[HiBaller]

I suspect that the asset names (and possibly items in the config file) were created using a non-Roman character set. Those character sets consist of 16-bit characters. The first 8-bits identifies the language, and the second 8-bits is the character.

I'm sure anyone has gotten emails (mostly spam) containing nothing but question marks. This is the representation of those characters rendered into a Roman character set.

EDIT: Well, I'll be darned. I was typing this at the time also. We must be right!

Bill