Kilrathi HUD concepts

Ok, does anyone know where this came from or what it is?
I found it on my laptop's hard disk and the file was called "KS3SO.png" for some reason, I don't remember whether I called it like that or somebody else. I think I have seen it before here, but I can't remember where.

KS3SO.png


I like that one much better than the movie-derived one, although I would prefer to have a syllable alphabet instead of what we see here.
Perhaps I'll try to assign those to Katakana syllables just for the lulz and see what happens...

EDIT: There's one problem with that obviously: Both Hiragana and Katakana use more than 40 different characters. I only have 26 here....
 
Aginor said:
EDIT: There's one problem with that obviously: Both Hiragana and Katakana use more than 40 different characters. I only have 26 here....
Click to expand...

Might have to try converting the Hiragana and Katakana to their Romanji equivalents first - and that's if I understand the problem correctly...
 
Oh, I still have all that from the time when I tried to learn Japanese myself, and it can also be found easily on the net.
here for example: http://www.learnjapanesefree.com/katakana.html
But the problem with a too small number of characters stays. I would need 50 characters for the 50 Katakana signs.

That's the great thing about our single letter alphabet, we only need 26 different letters.
...Ok, maybe a few more in some cases, for example the ä,ö,ü and so on in German, but most English speaking folks have the same problems pronouncing them as I have with the Norwegian 'y' and you can use other letters combined to have a similar effect, so we don't really need them.
 
English uses 26 letters, but has 56 distinct sounds in the most common dialects (e.g. Received Pronounciation in Britain, or Standard American). The issue of having more sounds than letters is most visible with English's 5 (or 6 including "Y") vowel symbols while having 13 vowel sounds (long and short for each vowel, plus the "schwa" that cna be spelled with ANY of the five vowels, and two more besides).

Japanese on the other hand maps only a single pronunciation to each of the 46 basic symbols. You get more symbols to remember, but there is never any ambiguity as to which sound is meant.
 
That's correct, syllable alphabets have their advantages as well.
One is the one you just mentioned, another one is that normally the words are much shorter to write because they consist of less characters.
The pronunciation of English (or German for that matter) words is influenced by the letters' combinations (and sometimes you just have to know it, which is even worse).

That's also a reason why I would like Kilrathi script to be syllable based (which also seems to be the case in the movie btw).
The problem stays though: In none of the Kilrathi scripts I found yet there are more than 26 characters.
 
Aginor said:
Ok, does anyone know where this came from or what it is?
Click to expand...
Sure do. It's the alphabet from WCP - we came across it on one of those WCP/SO backup CDs that the CIC has for download. We used it as an Easter Egg in Standoff (you get an email from Prince Thrakhath which is written using this font, and if you are able to decipher it, you will know all the letters of the font). Kilrathi writing that uses this font can also be seen in the WCP intro, on the stone tablet.

What you need to keep in mind, of course, is that this cannot be considered official. It is a fact that someone on the WCP team created a set of 26 Kilrathi letters, and it is a fact that images of these letters were used in the WCP intro - but nonetheless, no official WC product gives us information to confirm that the Kilrathi use a 26 letter alphabet, and all attempts to decrypt the Kilrathi tablet in the WCP intro using this alphabet have produced only gibberish.

This is also the case with the WC Movie - there's really nothing to confirm that yes, those symbols actually mean letters. It's not like Ultima, where each game came with a manual that allowed you to translate runes into Latin letters.

For you this is good news, as it means that you can interpret either of these scripts any way you like.
 
Ah, thanks!
Now I know why I called the file that way. It means Kilrathi script 3 (perhaps it was the third I encountered) and the SO stands for Standoff :D

And yes, that's indeed good news. Now I have to think about how to use it. Mainly for decorative purposes I guess, on a couple of interface screens.
 
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There is a description of the kilrathi writing system in one of the manuals I remember, describing vertical sets of lines, four per glyph, and each set sounding out a phonic. You can see this on the dralthi cockpit from wc1, just above the pilots knees next to the left and right vdu's.
 
Yeah, also it is the only scene ever where the script appears this way, it is very small, you can't decipher anything and still it is described in a manual for some unknown reason. Also, all other sources contradict that pattern of course.
Since it doesn't even change the whole time while you fly it may not be something the ship's computer says but maybe a poem someone painted in the cockpit for luck or something.

@AD:
Thanks, I already have that one bookmarked. It's a pity it ended this early, I love that thread (for obvious reasons). Unfortunately concerning the fonts (and also parts of the language) we did never really figure out a good pattern that fits to everything.

EDIT: I would love to have a whole dictionary and write sentences in real Kilrathi, but I'm pretty sure I don't have enough words. That's why I may write the way the Standoff guys did. But I'm still thinking about that one.
 
Yay! My copy of Freedom Flight arrived from the UK today. So now I can read more about Kilrathi :)
And it also fits because I finished reading Action Stations on friday. Perfect timing :)

And here is another question of mine: We have several Kilrathi fonts, but does any of them contain numbers? If not, how was that solved by fans before and do we have any clue how those number signs may look like?
I know the Kilrathi are supposed to use a base8 system, so we need eight numbers and maybe one or two special characters for separating them and so on...
 
Well, here I am again, and this time I brought something special.

I finally got sick of cutting and pasting letters from various pictures like the one above and fitting them together in order to write Kilrathi script, so I....

...downloaded an opensource font designer tool and created a *.TTF font file based on the WCP script, adding a few number characters (only 0-7 because of the Kilrathi number system) and some special characters.
I think that was also done by the Standoff team for their easter egg, but since I couldn't find that font file anywhere (not sure if they released it) and since it seems to lack punctuation marks (like the exclamation mark) and I assume it also lacks numbers (dunno, we don't see them) I did those myself.

Here it is, download it, install it and have fun writing in Kilrathi! :)
This is still WIP of course so tell me what you think about it and what I could improve!
 

Attachments

Type light 3.2
It's not really a good program in the free version. I couldn't even place the symbols in teh background and vectorize them that way, but I had to draw them manually, which is a lot of work. Also the free version does not allow to rotate or mirror the glyphs. It is a very, very basic version.

Is FontForge free? I thought it was 31days shareware. (which would have been sufficient but I couldn't know that :D )
 
Aginor said:
I think that was also done by the Standoff team for their easter egg, but since I couldn't find that font file anywhere (not sure if they released it) and since it seems to lack punctuation marks (like the exclamation mark) and I assume it also lacks numbers (dunno, we don't see them) I did those myself.
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Well, our font can be found inside Standoff, but it's no use to anyone - it's done using WCP's own font format (which is basically just a set of pictures rolled into one file - and those would look horrible if scaled up or down). And yes, it only includes those 26 letters, nothing else.

By the way, about punctuation - remember that the Kilrathi might not actually have any, or may have just a few. This is certainly the way it was for many of our own writing systems. While many systems (but far, far from all) had one or two marks (usually something to note the end of a sentence), our own Latin system is the only one that developed such a broad range of punctuation marks - and that only happened because the written word became such an important part of our culture. The Kilrathi may be a little less developed in that area...
 
Well, our font can be found inside Standoff, but it's no use to anyone - it's done using WCP's own font format (which is basically just a set of pictures rolled into one file - and those would look horrible if scaled up or down). And yes, it only includes those 26 letters, nothing else.
Click to expand...
Well, then my font is more useful than I thought. :)

By the way, about punctuation - remember that the Kilrathi might not actually have any, or may have just a few. This is certainly the way it was for many of our own writing systems. While many systems (but far, far from all) had one or two marks (usually something to note the end of a sentence), our own Latin system is the only one that developed such a broad range of punctuation marks - and that only happened because the written word became such an important part of our culture. The Kilrathi may be a little less developed in that area...
Click to expand...
My thoughts exactly, which is one of the reasons why I didn't include many of them (the other one me being a lazy person).
 
Aginor said:
Is FontForge free? I thought it was 31days shareware. (which would have been sufficient but I couldn't know that :D )
Click to expand...

To my knowledge, it's freeware. At least, I haven't come across anything on the site that would suggest otherwise. I haven't had much luck with it as yet, though that's largely for lack of trying.
 
Interesting. I'll take a look at it.

EDIT: Now I remember. I tried to use FontForge but I didn't find any binary for download that actually worked on my PC :(
 
Quarto said:
By the way, about punctuation - remember that the Kilrathi might not actually have any, or may have just a few. This is certainly the way it was for many of our own writing systems. While many systems (but far, far from all) had one or two marks (usually something to note the end of a sentence), our own Latin system is the only one that developed such a broad range of punctuation marks - and that only happened because the written word became such an important part of our culture. The Kilrathi may be a little less developed in that area...
Click to expand...
Japanese gets by using just a period, comma, parentheses, and quotation brackets mostly. Exclamation and questions are marked by spelling out the vocalized suffixes that are normally used in speech when one asks a question ("ka") or makes an exclamation ("yo", "zo", etc.).
 
Another Yay!
Today End Run, Fleet Action and False Colors arrived at my house.
They have a long way behind them, from Houston, Texas to the northern Black Forest area in Germany where I live.
They also seem to be in good shape, and they were rather cheap. I normally don't order used books but it is nearly impossible to get new Wing Commander books (except the movie books), I think I saw just a single new copy of Action Stations for 200€ somewhere. So I did expect worse things actually, I'm pleasantly surprised.

Now I'm thinking about whether I should buy the WC3 and WC4 novelizations.... I fear that I might not like the canonical decisions and achievements of Blair and thus... I don't know... kill the immersion in the games maybe? Because I think Blair is a dumbass or something. :D
So what do you think? Should I try to get those? Do they have content which could be really important for me or something?

EDIT: Also this seems to be my 500th post, having joined in 2006 (and lurking around before that for another two years or so.) Yay! (ok,ok, it doesn't really matter how many posts anyone has, but I like 'round' numbers)
 
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