GVO and NAO: Chatting System

For any online game, being able to communicate with other players, and sometimes with the Game Masters, is very important. Although words is not the only way to express yourself, if I may say so, it is the most important method.

From my observations, many Taiwanese forumers expressed frustration over how to communicate among each other in GVO using Chinese. Only and only Japanese characters are supported, apart from ASCII characters, of course. Chinese characters that are not inside the Japanese vocabulary cannot be used at all. This is understandable, of course, since majority of the players know and should know Japanese.

Moving on to NAO, the Taiwan version is the Traditional Chinese version. And there is another Simplified Chinese version for China. (I'm not sure whether it's still in the beta testing status.) I know how to read most of the Traditional Chinese sentences, but if you ask me to recognize them character by character then I'll face some difficulties. Thus it is very difficult for me to type in Traditional Chinese. Luckily even though it is the Traditional Chinese version, it also supports Simplified Chinese input method. I could not try with Japanese input method but chances are the words are 16-bit encoded.

There are a handful of Taiwanese players who expressed intentions to join the English version of the GVO instead of the Taiwan version. I myself is still undecided but chances are the North America version would be after the Asian versions so I could see how the Asian versions go.

For the future English version, logically 8-bit encoding is enough. However I really do hope that it will be 16-bit encoded. Thus far I'm only familiar with the ports and goods in Chinese. If you ask me for the location of a port in Chinese, most probably I would roughly know its whereabouts. But if the same port is in English, then I would need to search for it. So if I can type in Chinese, then I could ask for help in translation. :P