There’s Latin-1 which gets you full coverage on many European languages and almost complete coverage on several others (e.g. French uses œ, which it doesn’t hav

There’s Latin-1 which gets you full coverage on many European languages and almost complete coverage on several others (e.g. French uses œ, which it doesn’t have but French readers will be able to understand if oe is substituted). The problem with Latin-1 and other 1-byte options is that, unlike ASCII, they aren’t forward compatible with utf-8, which is the emerging de facto string exchange encoding. For a stand alone video game, maybe that doesn’t matter but for anything network enabled it can be a big issue.