Valid characters in the Mission Editor
 

I do not recall if I dreamt this, or if there really is a post, but I seem to recall someone posting about the valid characters that SH4 uses with the various fonts found in the game, or maybe they had "printed" text with the fonts? I do not recall. But besides a character-count limit in the Mission Briefing text, seen when the player's "orders" print in-game when going on a career patrol, there also seems to be a "premium" paid for certain characters (for lack of understanding of what is happening). It seems that the forward slash character "/" makes the character count go up, or something, because if that slash is used, the game will not display as many characters, and if the "limit" is reached, (whatever it actually is), then the mission will CTD the game, as found in several instances, such as recently experienced by goldmastersims in current mission objective gives a crash to desktop. There does not seem to be any rhyme nor reason to if, and when a mission will CTD from a Mission Briefing character count violation, other than we do know that a 'plain text' count of roughly 1124 characters will crash the mission, but we have had less than 750 characters also crash, with a seemingly primary contributor being CR/LF characters, or the "pipe" character, which seems to count for full lines of 62 characters of text, and not just the CR/LF character... Anyway, does anyone remember what the game's 'English' fonts can and cannot display?

i wish.

i can say that there are characters entered into the various TSR fields that will not properly display within the game. they end up as some graphical character that appears to be the offspring of a copyright character, and "at" sign, and an ampersand.

unfortunately, i never took the time to go back and find the character in the TSR when i noticed it in the game.

i will be more attentive in the future, should i experience one of these rogues.
:Kaleun_Salute:

Example "known-bad" characters are the degree symbol °, Alt-0176 of which it would be REALLY nice to be able to use for lat/long coordinates. Quote marks also do not display properly, but I forget what they look like... maybe a continuity, or maybe an infinity symbol? I cannot remember. I just discovered the "Slash" ( / ) today as possibly causing a high character count, or maybe is "invalid" and I already knew that the "pipe" ( | ) character will cause an entire line's worth of characters (which I think is 62 characters per line). I also do not trust the "dash" ( - ) character any longer. I have not attempted to use a "backslash" ( \ ), as well as I can remember, and most of the <Shift> number keys do not display properly, and might also cause a bad "character count". My memory tells me that a "question mark" ( ? ) looks rather odd, and is not immediately recognizable as a question mark, as well as a few other idiosyncrasies that I cannot remember just now, and like you will have to start taking notes as missions load... If I look at actual US Mission Order examples in sub books, or in the War Patrol Reports, you CANNOT replicate the way they were written, since so many of the "special" characters are so 'special'... I wonder if creating a "new" font would help in this regard? I do not think I want to wander into that minefield just yet though... lol :arrgh!:

ok here are some test results.
TSR for Mission Briefing
MissionBriefing=&atro! the @re arou#d Wa$e Island. %nterdict ^ny tra&fic, *specially (inbound) cargo_and-fuel +hips. P<trol f>r ? days :and : {then} [return] to| base.


Orders within the game
https://i.ibb.co/42LNNV7/Picture0005.jpg

Conclusions:
keeps the:

• ampersand
• exclamation (bang),
• percent (%),
• both parens (),
• underscore,
• dash,
• plus sign (+),
• question mark,
• colon

forgets the:

• AT sign (@),
• the pound sign (#),
• dollar sign ($),
• caret (^),
• asterisk (*),
• less than (<),
• greater than (>),
• braces {},
• brackets[], and
• vertical bar(|).

not sure what the specials do to the count but then we cannot really test that: it either works or doesn't work.:doh:
i missed the semi colon...entered two colons. have to edit that and try again.

Why don't you use S3D to Edit the needed Fonts?
:hmmm:

Because I am awful at it... lol - of course, I did try to follow along with the skwasjer's tutorial, and I might have misunderstood some steps... :roll:

My main question about all of this, is are there "reserved" characters in the game? Like some web sites don't allow you to use the bang character in a password, because it is an OS "switch"... ?? I can use <Alt><0176> in a text editor, or even in the game's Mission Editor, and it will indeed display a "degree" symbol ° as it does here - but it does not show that symbol on one of the "orders" pages, such as what KM has above... Why does a "pipe" character, which is used in Single Mission tsr files for a CR/LF character, count as the same number of chacaters as are left on a given line where the symbol is used on the orders "page"? In other words, 32 character spaces left on a line, and the "pipe" will be 32 characters in length. An empty line, for a paragraph separation counts as 62 characters - the whole line... why? Yet, if you have a 12 character word that will not fit on the line above that only has room for 10 characters, the line above will NOT use those 10 characters, and they are added to the end of the file, apparently, up to the point where the "signature" is on the page, of course... Just such a strange page "definition"... Like it's compiled at run-time through and with menu_1024_768.ini, which is my guess... Kind of like a running script.

Where do you find the Font setting for those TSR files?