Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in Toturi's Blurty:

Tuesday, July 29th, 2003
11:05 pm	Programming: Multilanguage support A few years ago I added a bit of code to our in-house game library/engine to support text input in languages other than English, specifically, Chinese, Japanese and Korean (or CJK as it is commonly known). At the time, I insisted that this was not something that was done normally and in fact, I had never encountered a game that had full-blown Japanese input support while running in full-screen mode. All the Japanese games that I'd ever played used an on-screen character map that let the players click on the hiragana or katakana characters to compose their names. Eventually, I cobbled together just enough code to handle inline input in Japanese and Korean and we simply told the publishers that for Chinese support, they'd have to forfeit the performance benefits of DirectDraw in order for the Chinese Input Method Editor to do its job and show the user the candidate list in a system-drawn window. Two years later, I look back at that code to find that while numerous improvements could be made, it was a pretty good stab for my first attempt at creating software for an international audience. We started by converting all string resources from ASCII and MBCS to Unicode. While Windows 95/98/Me may not provide as much support for Unicode as Windows NT/2K/XP, it provides text conversion from Unicode to ASCII or MBCS through any installed code page. Once you've obtained an ASCII or MBCS string, displaying it correctly is simply a matter of creating a font that supports the character set for the language of the string. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 15th, 2003
12:02 am	Tile Rendering Engine Ditched libSDL for TRE. Since I'm only planning on creating windowed mode games, I only care about raw GDI rendering performance. With dirty rects on, my custom rendering engine (Chaos) gets 100 fps with sprite alpha-blending enabled. The other factor is that after brushing the dust off of Chaos, it looked a bit more salvageable than the last time I looked. My original goal with Chaos was to create a game engine that is blazing fast at rendering, and provides a very easy-to-use API. The first part is pretty much done, but the second part is only just starting to take shape. I'm planning on releasing the source to the RPG-dev community, but not until I have at least a good demo prepared. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 20th, 2003
10:29 pm	Brain fart RPGDX.net. Lots of mini-RPGs, some look pretty darn good, others, well, look pretty bad. The web site hosted a 48-hour competition recently. The winning entry isn't all that bad. Very traditional. FF/DQ style overhead walk-around view. Megami Tensei style combat. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 19th, 2003
5:35 pm	Software development as a hobby I've been following the threads on RPG-Dev.net for some time now, posting a comment or two in response to the odd topic that caught my eye. The sheer enthusiam that these kids show in talking about their next big project is amazing. Reminds me of that one project that I'd been working on for over 10 years now... I'm currently working on a tile-rendering engine (TRE). It will use data exported from TileStudio using a custom definition file. I have chosen libSDL as the base on which to build TRE. This will greatly facilitate porting of TRE to multiple platforms (which of course, is always a good thing). Current Music: Toto - Africa (GTA:VC soundtrack) (Comment on this)