Factorio Forums

Was playing MP on a European server today and the oddest thing was happening. When the Russian players would speak English we could all see it, but when they speak Russian (I assume using a Russian character set?) their chat messages were just empty spaces although you could still see punctuation marks.

I don't know if this is an unavoidable side effect of different people having the game installed with different languages, or if there's a way to have chat messages in other languages still appear correctly?

Well, that's because of how letters appear on computers.
It's all about encoding and the character set your computer is using. Russian charsets are much different than the standard English charset, so display errors will most likely occur. Normally this really shouldn't be a problem, because most of the world either runs on some form of Unicode or ASCII, which has all of the defined charsets for special-character languages, which is why when you visit some russian website (say, for example: Google.ru), your computer can automagiclly ajust to the required charset.

For Factorio, though, that's a bit different.
In games, usually the game developers want to create their own font for the game, so it fits better. In order to do that, you have to create a new proprietary charset for use in the game. Since Factorio supports multiple languages, and assuming that you have a english distribution, your chat would try to display the russian characters, but can't because the developers MOST LIKELY did not include the russian charset in the english distribution, to shed off some HD install space.

That, or it's just a dumb glitch.

Thanks for the report.
Fixed for 0.15.17