1 Topic by transcix (edited by transcix 2017-08-10 03:31:18)

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Topic: settings.cfg: special char in name displays in menu but not in-game

I thoroughly searched the forum but no mention of this problem.

In an attempt to include special characters in my player name I edited the Teeworlds settings.cfg file accordingly and saved it in UTF-8. By looking in the name field under the 'settings' tab when Teeworlds is running I could determine which characters are and aren't compatible with the game. However it appears even those characters that are compatible--and which I've doubly confirmed are compatible as I've seen them in other players' names--don't appear in my player name when I join a game, even though they appear correctly in the name field. Another player I asked confirmed they don't appear. For instance if the name field displays "ƬɌANSCIX" (with a special "Ƭ" and "Ɍ"), in-game it will only display as "ANSCIX". A special character between two regular characters produces a space such as "xɌx" producing "x x". If I exclusively use special characters for my name, such as just "ƬɌ", then in-game it displays as "(1)". I wonder if the players I occasionally see in games with the name (1) are actually named thusly or if their names are entirely composed of special characters..

Here's some additional info about my situation that may or may not be helpful. I run Ubuntu and I assure you it was a challenge to track down the settings.cfg file in the first place (as it was a hidden file). When I found it I began experimenting to see which characters appeared correctly in the name field. I would paste a few special characters into the file, save the file, run the game to check, exit the game and refresh the file in order to try a few more special characters and so on. After going on like this for several attempts however, eventually when I exit the game I find the characters I entered have been distorted in the file, appearing as weird little rectangles and stuff and when I try to save new special characters to the file it says there's a problem with the encoding. After some investigation it appears the settings.cfg file switched to a Western character encoding instead of UTF, though I have no idea why it suddenly made the switch, and so I would switch it back to UTF.

I've confirmed all of this on two separate computers both running Ubuntu 16.04. I've tried uninstalling and re-installing Teeworlds on both computers but it doesn't help. Also, and probably irrelevant but perhaps not, after uninstalling Teeworlds the hidden .Teeworlds file would remain so I manually deleted it, but upon re-installing Teeworlds there were two .Teeworlds files (numbered) and some trash info. In order to really get a new .Teeworlds file upon re-install I had to not only delete the previous file in between the installs but also empty the recycling bin or it would come back.

Edit: Someone in the game suggested adding special characters via a mod should work, so I'll look into this, but it looks exceedingly complicated for someone of my technical ability.

Thanks a bunch for any assistance!

2 Reply by heinrich5991

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Re: settings.cfg: special char in name displays in menu but not in-game

I think vanilla Teeworlds 0.6.4 blocks any non-ASCII characters from names.

3 Reply by Neox

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Re: settings.cfg: special char in name displays in menu but not in-game

Adding special characters via a mod will not work. Special characters are blocked from the server ; they are replaced by spaces. If there are no characters in a name (or if it only has white spaces) then it gets renamed to (1).

Special characters in the name are blocked since version 0.6.2 (if I'm not wrong), but you can still use them on some mods though.

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4 Reply by transcix (edited by transcix 2017-08-10 20:12:16)

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Re: settings.cfg: special char in name displays in menu but not in-game

Interesting. I have the newest version of Teeworlds so I can't use special characters in my player name, but I can still see special characters in the names of other players (who are using an earlier version of the software). Yes?

If I wanted to use an earlier version of Teeworlds that supports special characters, is there any drawback to this? OK I looked into this, there's a vulnerability for virus via server, but I have Ubuntu so I should be OK as long as I don't give out my password to random notifications. It's true that version 0.6.4 says "Fix decoding of overlong UTF-8 sequences to non-invalid code points, leading to possible duplicate names" so maybe that means no more special characters, I'll try an older version and post back.

5 Reply by transcix (edited by transcix 2017-08-11 04:24:02)

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Re: settings.cfg: special char in name displays in menu but not in-game

Unfortunately the problem persists. I tried installing versions 0.6.3, 0.6.2, 0.6.1 and 0.6.0 but there was no improvement. I tried installing versions 0.5-trunk and 0.5.2 but there were no active players so it seems they're no longer compatible.

After talking to some players in game, I'm starting to think it's just not possible to have special characters in player names in most ctf5 servers (I only play ctf5).

I'll rest with this determination unless anyone can prove otherwise.

Thanks to heinrich5991 and Neox for their replies! smile

6 Reply by wappsify

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Re: settings.cfg: special char in name displays in menu but not in-game

It doesn't really matter what version you run locally seeing as the special characters get removed server-side and most servers run an up-to-date version that forbids those characters. That is why you won't be able to have them in your name regardless of the client version you use.

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7 Reply by Deepfinder (edited by Deepfinder 2017-08-11 23:27:13)

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Re: settings.cfg: special char in name displays in menu but not in-game

Looks like you doesn't understand how teeworlds works! There is CLIENT-version and SERVER-version.
With a client, you connect yourself to a server. In client, you can change your name. However, the server itself can also change your playername! e.g. by adding a (number) behind similar names

So, now your problem is, that all SERVER-versions since version 0.6.3 doesn't like special chars (the biggest stupidities ever when u ask me, oy said it's because " 'so invisible names can't be possible!!!!' (by adding the " "-special character)) - so vanilla-servers simply, as stupid as they are, remove special chars from the player/clan-name

At the moment, the most CTF-servers (do you mean this with "ctf5-servers"?) are up-to-date and so special-chars in your name will be removed automatically. Doesn't matter which client you use, the actual vanilla-servers will ALWAYS do it!

So what's the solution? Play on older vanilla server-version OR play on mods! (the most mod-developers removed the stupid special-char-remove, so you can see there special chars)
But it looks like you even doesn't found any mod-servers - this is a funny thing in teeworlds; as every other player before you, you should try to play with the filters on the right site in the serverbrowser (hint: try to remove "standard gametype", "standard map"! XD)

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8 Reply by transcix

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Re: settings.cfg: special char in name displays in menu but not in-game

Thanks for the reply and clarifications. Yes I could find other servers, but I can't find good ctf5 games there which is what I'm after.