Emojis bug

[blazing sequoia]

Since DN update, there's some bug about the emojis. Such as Vietnamese flag 🇻🇳 emoji when i send it, it become Norway and Brunei flag 🇳🇴🇧🇳 emojis. Please fix it 💀

Also, can you please add 🥹 and ඞ emojis in this game? :c

[stone moth]

Yeah, I noticed this with flag emojis too. I'm going to guess it's down to how flag emojis are implemented in unicode (they work differently to all other emojis)

I doubt the devs wrote their own emoji parser so it could be a problem with one of the third party libraries.

Flags are essentially two special emojis that represent the two letters of the country code.

Every flag gets turns into two emojis (two Regional indicator symbols) ,
For some reason each regional identifier is being split into two different emojis (usually two regional identifiers)

I tested this and proved this is the case by doing some examples in my star system chat:

the two letters are the two letter identifier used for each country as per the unicode specifications, and as you can see, the same symbol is substituted consistently.

(ie, I chose pairs of countries with reversible country codes and they substitued the same letters in the opposite order)

I tested a few more and this was consistent, but these screenshots should prove beyond doubt this is the problem that is occurring.

[stone moth]

I think I know what is happening

the orange A is the stand in character for "regional indicator A"

It looks like that is happening is the following:

for the country code:

XY (were X and Y are the country code)

This is being stored inthe database as:

-X-Y (or AXAY - where - is a blank or A is the 'A' regional identifier)

(with a blank character before each character code)

The emoji parser then look ups

-X and -Y are then parsed as flag codes, but will usually fail, so the emoji library just picks the 'best' match.

For example:

GB (uk flag) becomes AG BB ie first hits for -G -B
JP (japanese flag) become BJ FR : this is not as clean, but a fuzzy string matcher would probably consider that the closest match to -J -P depending on the search distance calculator

However, this is only a theory and without more testing, which would take a great deal of my time, and without knowing the libraries or code used by the game, it's the best I think I can do.

[dark rune]

Theres stuff like this occurring with regular emojis too

Don't remember every error of the top off of my head,but theres 🫠 for one thing

[stone moth]

It will be any emoji that is comprised of two emoji. For example: one with a skin tone color selected.

This is the regular emoji and a second emoji which has the instruction to modify the base emoji with a skin tone color

First message was:

👶

Second message was:

👶🏻

Bizarrely, light skin tone emoji is being mistaken for snowboarder it seems

[stone moth]

Going to give this a bump.

It's obviously not high priority, but is likely just a code library issue for processing two character emojis.

[wraith valley]

Fun fact discord does this bug too, if you know what flags to use

[stone moth]

Emojis are notorious problematic for bugs because they are essentially a hack of th UTF standard

I have since learned that this buy is a consequence of a Unity library not being able to look up multi-character emojis. There is a method for turning a character into a tile from a sprite sheet, where an emjoi is made up of two characters (ie, a flag is two country code characters, a skin toned emoji is an emoji character followed by a modiffer character) - the library does two sprite lookups.

With the flags, this is to two different flags. With the skin tone modifer this to the default emoji, followed by some random emoji that the skin ton modifier lies on in the sprite sheet.

[tranquil flare]

All skin tones translate into snowboarder. Example here: first is standard Thumps Up, followed by all other skin tone variants.

Some months ago I also saw emojis followed by the weight lifter 🏋️. Asking the person if they sent this on purpose returned negative. So at some moment in time translation for skin tones was different from today.

[stone moth]

by random, I didn[t mean it would change every time, just that it has no association to the skin tone modifier. Whereas the flags will always be two flags.

The lookup will be consistent every time

[tranquil flare]

Just wanted to add this since a few messages ago you pointed out that 'light skin' gets translated to snowboarder. I wanted to take it away from 'light skin'. It is every skin.

[stone moth]

ah, I see, I just tested one skintone modifier to show skin tone modifiers weren't working as well. If one failed they all would.

But it does make sense to show the complete set of fail states

[somber warren]

i would like to use nation flag emojis to label planets

[stone moth]

There is a way to sort of make this work until the bug is fixed, but it isn't pretty

You can make planets appear as a flag in these views using html commands:

So, planet named as 🇬🇧

But could be any of the flags

However, it will appear as the html code in other views