Resolves#3075
TODO before merge:
- [x] Properly draw non-korean strings while in korean mode (language
selection)
- [x] Check jak 3
- [x] Translation scaffolding (allow korean characters, add to Crowdin,
fix japanese locale, etc)
- [x] Check translation of text lines
- [x] Check translation of subtitle lines
- [x] Cleanup PR / some performance optimization (it's take a bit too
long to build the text and it shouldn't since the information is in a
giant lookup table)
- [x] Wait until release is cut
I confirmed the font textures are identical between Jak 2 and Jak 3, so
thank god for that.
Some examples of converting the korean encoding to utf-8. These show off
all scenarios, pure korean / korean with ascii and japanese / korean
with replacements (flags):
<img width="316" height="611" alt="Screenshot 2025-07-26 191511"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/614383ba-8049-4bf4-937e-24ad3e605d41"
/>
<img width="254" height="220" alt="Screenshot 2025-07-26 191529"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/1f6e5a6c-8527-4f98-a988-925ec66e437d"
/>
And it working in game. `Input Options` is a custom not-yet-translated
string. It now shows up properly instead of a disgusting block of
glyphs, and all the original strings are hopefully the same
semantically!:
<img width="550" height="493" alt="Screenshot 2025-07-26 202838"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9ebdf6c0-f5a3-4a30-84a1-e5840809a1a2"
/>
Quite the challenge. The crux of the problem is -- Naughty Dog came up
with their own encoding for representing korean syllable blocks, and
that source information is lost so it has to be reverse engineered.
Instead of trying to figure out their encoding from the text -- I went
at it from the angle of just "how do i draw every single korean
character using their glyph set".
One might think this is way too time consuming but it's important to
remember:
- Korean letters are designed to be composable from a relatively small
number of glyphs (more on this later)
- Someone at naughty dog did basically this exact process
- There is no other way! While there are loose patterns, there isn't an
overarching rhyme or reason, they just picked the right glyph for the
writing context (more on this later). And there are even situations
where there IS NO good looking glyph, or the one ND chose looks awful
and unreadable (we could technically fix this by adjusting the
positioning of the glyphs but....no more)!
Information on their encoding that gets passed to `convert-korean-text`:
- It's a raw stream of bytes
- It can contain normal font letters
- Every syllable block begins with: `0x04 <num_glyphs> <...the glyph
bytes...>`
- DO NOT confuse `num_glyphs` with num jamo, because some glyphs can
have multiple jamo!
- Every section of normal text starts with `0x03`. For example a space
would be `0x03 0x20`
- There are a very select few number of jamo glyphs on a secondary
texture page, these glyph bytes are preceeded with a `0x05`. These jamo
are a variant of some of the final vowels, moving them as low down as
possible.
Crash course on korean writing:
- Nice resource as this is basically what we are doing -
https://glyphsapp.com/learn/creating-a-hangeul-font
- Korean syllable blocks have either 2 or 3 jamo. Jamo are basically
letters and are the individual pieces that make up the syllable blocks.
- The jamo are split up into "initial", "medial" and "final" categories.
Within the "medial" category there are obvious visual variants:
- Horizontal
- Vertical
- Combination (horizontal + a vertical)
- These jamo are laid out in 6 main pre-defined "orientations":
- initial + vertical medial
- initial + horizontal medial
- initial + combination
- initial + vertical medial + final
- initial + horizontal medial + final
- initial + combination + final
- Sometimes, for stylistic reasons, jamo will be written in different
ways (ie. if there is nothing below a vertical vowel will be extended).
- Annoying, and ND's glyph set supports this stylistic choice!
- There are some combination of jamo that are never used, and some that
are only used for a single word in the entire language!
With all that in mind, my basic process was:
- Scan the game's entire corpus of korean text, that includes subtitles.
It's very easy to look at the font texture's glyphs and assign them to
their respective jamo
- This let me construct a mapping and see which glyphs were used under
which context
- I then shoved this information into a 2-D matrix in excel, and created
an in-game tool to check every single jamo permutation to fill in the
gaps / change them if naughty dogs was bad. Most of the time, ND's
encoding was fine.
-
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTtyMeb5-mL5rXseS9YllVj32BGCISOGZFic6nkRV5Er5aLZ9CLq1Hj_rTY7pRCn-wrQDH1rvTqUHwB/pubhtml?gid=886895534&single=true
anything in red is an addition / modification on my part.
- This was the most lengthy part but not as long as you may think, you
can do a lot of pruning. For example if you are checking a 3-jamo
variant (the ones with the most permutations) and you've verified that
the medial jamo is as far up vertically as it can be, and you are using
the lowest final jamo that are available -- there is nothing to check or
improve -- for better or worse! So those end up being the permutations
between the initial and medial instead of a three-way permutation
nightmare.
- Also, while it is a 2d matrix, there's a lot of pruning even within
that. For example, for the first 3 orientations, you dont have to care
about final vowels at all.
- At the end, I'm left with a lookup table that I can use the encode the
best looking korean syllable blocks possible given the context of the
jamo combination.