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Unicode 16 now includes retro video game sprites [pdf]
- qingcharles 2y agoHere's the rest of the updates: https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/ https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/
- db48x 2y agoGood, I’ve been waiting for the LARGE TYPE PIECE LOWER LEFT CROTCH.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41504952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41504952
- CJefferson 2y agoDoes anyone know the history of why these were added? Some of them clearly look like copyrighted characters from specific games, space invaders and PAC MAN in particular.
- nemomarx 2y agoI notice that the pac man example has a little tail or something on the opposite end from the mouth, so that seems like it might just dodge the copyright / IP?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ThatPlayer 2y agoThe text description for it isn't pac man, but snake head. So I'm thinking it's more for a snake game sprite than pac man. With a solid block for the body, the "tail" to connect the head so you don't have a floating head.
- rbits 2y agoI don't see anything that looks like a tail. It's just a circle with a quarter triangle taken out.
- lmpdev 2y agoNah the meat of it is the pixel patterns below those You could conceivably combine them to create any sprite
- lifthrasiir 2y agoAll Unicode characters have their associated proposals [1] [2] which you can check them directly. In particular, some copyrighted characters that can't be made generic enough are indeed omitted, and everything else have received generic character names based on their appearances. [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21234-terminals-smalltalk.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21234-terminals-smalltalk.p... [2] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21235r-terminals-supplement.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21235r-terminals-supplement...
- unclad5968 2y agoThat's cool, but why? Does unicode really need to include spritesheets for a 4 way running character?
- lifthrasiir 2y agoAs always, round-trippability across different existing (though legacy) character sets has been a major factor in encoding them.
- lmpdev 2y agoI wonder if you could create a text based sprite rendering system using the generic pixel sprite blocks here? Would be an interesting project
- shikon7 2y agoI wonder if at some point they regret restricting Unicode to 1,114,112 code points.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lifthrasiir 2y agoIt took almost 3 decades until the previously unassigned Plane 3 got assigned. There would be "some point" if the humanity and also Unicode continues to strive, but that wouldn't be in this century.
- extraduder_ire 2y agoThat's about 9 times more than are already assigned. I assume they would extend the codespace after that point, and either break UTF-16 or create some hack with it like surrogate-surrogate-pairs. IIRC, it was initially limited to 16 bits outright.
- ksec 2y agoAnd yet they unified the CJK characters when they could have been individually assigned.
- grishka 2y agoAnd didn't give a distinct codepoint to the Turkish "i" that needs to keep the dot when transformed to upper case.
- lifthrasiir 2y agoI think it was a very hard decision in Unicode's part, because ISO/IEC 8859-9 (or more accurately speaking, its 8-bit counterpart) already had aliased a normal Latin lowercase "i" with the Turkish "i" and Unicode had to maintain the equivalence as much as possible.
- mmastrac 2y agoThese are cute, but another sign that Unicode is straying from their original mandate which was to represent characters already in use in other systems (and to help bootstrap under-digitized languages to become digital). Stop adding random emoji. Don't add fictional languages, no matter how cool. Don't do.. this. By continuing to extend Unicode like this, they risk diluting their core purpose and creating unnecessary complexity. Unicode should remain focused on its original goal and not cater to niche or novel additions. EDIT: I'm certain there's a proposal submitter out there that contorted the argument beyond the reasonable point that these existed in an old Usborne programming book text as inline images and need to be represented. I'm going to try to hunt it down. EDIT 2: The original proposal? https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf Some of the proposed characters might have come from an older submission as well https://unicode.org/L2/L2021/21234-terminals-smalltalk.pdf https://unicode.org/L2/L2021/21234-terminals-smalltalk.pdf
- lifthrasiir 2y agoThe thing is that, additional emojis and mere symbols like these are technically much easier to add than under-digitized languages which require much more research. (The initial introduction of emojis wasn't easy, let me clarify.) These characters are just another entry to the code chart and Unicode character database without any additional mechanism to fit. So it should be okay as long as there are not too many characters added in this way. Reply to EDIT: People who made the proposals are already well known in Unicode and they know what they are proposing. Michael Everson for example is responsible for encoding many other writing systems other than such symbols.
- astrange 2y agoThe main reason to add new emoji is that it gets people to update their Unicode standards / phone OSes / etc. Otherwise they won't care enough to get the other less interesting stuff.
- throw-the-towel 2y agoWho's "people"? Consumers aren't gonna buy a new phone just to get U+22E5B VOMITING MALE PLATYPUS WITH DESCENDER, and system implementers are free to add the new emoji and ignore everything else in the standard.
- floxy 2y agoBipolar transistors, but no field effect transistors? Left and right facing diodes, but not up and down?
- jdlshore 2y agoThese are encoding symbols from 80s microcomputers, so presumably the lack is in the source material.
- withinboredom 2y agoReally looking forward to representing hexadecimals with these new 'sextant' characters....
- jonathrg 2y agoWhy are some of the octant mosaics missing? Most obviously, there is no character with all or none of the octants filled. My best case is that there are existing symbols to fill in the gaps.
- grose 2y agoIndeed, the full one is in the Block Elements block (and the empty one is a space, I guess) https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2580.pdf https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2580.pdf
- grishka 2y agoAn honest question — when will unicode be finished? Or is it now like so many other things in IT, an endless path with no goal?
- thristian 2y agoAs long as humans are writing things, they will try to come up with new things to differentiate themselves from the humans who'd gone before, those things will be written down, and we'll probably need new code points to express them properly. The alternative to "a new version of Unicode every year" is not stasis, but rather new and incompatible encoding schemes frothing like JavaScript frameworks.
- flockonus 2y agoFaces of dice would be useful to include.
- db48x 2y agoThe Unicode Consortium doesn’t try to guess or predict which characters will be useful. Instead they go by which characters are actually attested in actual things humans have written. Thus we have characters like ꙮ U+A66E CYRILLIC LETTER MULTIOCULAR O, which was a doodle used by a monk in a single manuscript in place of a normal “o” in the phrase “many‐eyed seraphim” (“many‐eyed” has an “oo” in the middle in Slavonic). Note that the monk further illuminated this character with red ink; he was having some fun with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_O_variants#/media/File:Cyrillic_multiocular_o_in_Psalter,_1429.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_O_variants#/media/Fil...
- grose 2y ago2680-2685 in the Miscellaneous Symbols block: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf
- Esras 2y agoEchoing a similar sentiment, so supporting legacy retro video game sprites are very important to ensure are in and never change, but including flags is not okay? I re-read the justification for it recently and it still doesn't hold water, because it felt like it boiled down to "It's hard." I was thinking about how Minecraft has a system of components and layers that let you compose various flags on their banners. Obviously that's far, far simpler than country (and autonomous region, and county, and province, and and and) flags that can include text, symbols, and practically entire images. But I did wonder if there was some way that could be represented. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly well-versed enough in code points and their ilk to propose anything useful. But, I am torn. Archival projects are important, too, and language evolves. These decisions will live for potentially hundreds or thousands (Linear A) of years, and interoperability in computing is important.
- lifthrasiir 2y agoFlags are in Unicode, they are just encoded like "the flag of United States" instead of "seven horizontal stripes and a specific arrangement of 50 white stars in a top-left blue background". (And the flag of US changes, although it hadn't been for many decades.)
- Esras 2y agoI was specifically referring to this: https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag-emoji.html https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag...
- lifthrasiir 2y agoIn that case, the post clearly identifies the problem: > Identities are fluid and unstoppable which makes mapping them to a formal unchanging universal character set incompatible. If you really want to have identity flags encoded in spite of that, you don't really need Unicode's blessing. The pride flag is already not a single character anyway, it's U+1F3F3 U+FE0F U+200D U+1F308 (white flag -- emoji force -- ZWJ -- rainbow) and you can always create new ZWJ sequences with your own font. Or you can make a font that automatically synthesizes flags from some ZWJ sequence pattern, which is no longer semantically valid but should be much more flexible. Once they got sufficiently popular, there is no other reason that your new ZWJ sequence(s) shouldn't go into Unicode per se. Unicode's decision to not process non-country flag emoji proposals is because they are closely tied with (minority) groups and Unicode wasn't expected to do any resulting conflict resolution. If you can somehow resolve that problem in advance, then you should probably do that first and propose what you've done.
- flembat 2y agoIs there a font to use that contains these? I am really glad to see them. In the past when hoping to write a game in a terminal I found only one space invader symbol.