how does one do internationalization? i am very interested in developing my software not only for the english-speaking market, but for japanese and chinese-speaking markets as well. i am currently using a lousy (and slow) bitmapped text-display system using 26x26 or 28x28 characters. i dont want to rely on a microsoft ime, because not everyone has that...and i cant use the small freeware ime dlls available (eg developer.realgamez.com, click on Japanese Freeware IME) because of interfacing issues with c++ (my dll was written using borland/inprise''s delphi, which, while brilliant, is a pig of a this to use standard windows resources/ handles etc with. TBitmaps and the like are much easier than HBITMAPs, HWNDs, and the like that c/c++ programmers must live with on a daily basis...) summarized very quickly, i am looking for a method of displaying alternative (asian) character sets in a directx display, very quickly (at the speed of a normal text-out instruction or faster...), that doesn''t rely on big slow dlls or the microsoft global ime thing... chris theropod@stargatesg-1.com

I''ve not done anything like this before, but one way might be to have a chache of say 50 glyphs, which are just IDirectDrawSurface''s (or you could have one surface with 50 glyphs on it) then when you want one that''s not in the cache, you simply replace the oldest one in there. You could draw them by getting the HDC for the surface and using the standard GDI functions.

This method isn''t very fast, especially since I have no idea how often you get repeated glyphs in the asian languages. Plus, I don''t think Unicode is implemented in the Win9X operating systems.

I doubt you''re going to find very fast methods for displaying asian languages, because of the huge number of glyphs needed. It''s always a trade-off between speed and memory usage.

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War Worlds - A 3D Real-Time Strategy game in development.