[MINOR] Loading screen text is editable

[MattKC]

Burnout 3's loading screen ordinarily displays like so:

I had actually assumed this was just an image, but it turns out this is just text that's dutifully generated from a font and rendered in real time.

What that means is... the text is editable

When I thought about it more, having it be editable text made some sense. After all, any user-facing strings may have to be translated to other languages, and at that point it's probably easier to work with text than a bunch of images.

Interestingly, the string is hardcoded to English "LOADING" in the NTSC-U version. I guess it's not unbelievable that this version would only support English.

---

This also reveals something interesting in that Burnout 3 appears to use UTF-16 throughout - the "LOADING" string is stored and used as a wide string. At first I thought this was just an Xbox thing, since Microsoft/Windows generally have standardized on UTF-16 (the only major desktop OS vendor to do so), however even the PS2 build passes the string through a function called "CGtUnicode::ConvertUTF8toUTF16" before drawing the "LOADING" string on-screen. This implies that regardless of the platform, Burnout 3's code is in fact standardized on UTF-16 strings rather than UTF-8.

[nugg3t]

Burnout 3's loading screen ordinarily displays like so:

loading1.png

I had actually assumed this was just an image, but it turns out this is just text that's dutifully generated from a font and rendered in real time.

What that means is... the text is editable

loading2.png

When I thought about it more, having it be editable text made some sense. After all, any user-facing strings may have to be translated to other languages, and at that point it's probably easier to work with text than a bunch of images.

Interestingly, the string is hardcoded to English "LOADING" in the NTSC-U version. I guess it's not unbelievable that this version would only support English.

---

This also reveals something interesting in that Burnout 3 appears to use UTF-16 throughout - the "LOADING" string is stored and used as a wide string. At first I thought this was just an Xbox thing, since Microsoft/Windows generally have standardized on UTF-16 (the only major desktop OS vendor to do so), however even the PS2 build passes the string through a function called "CGtUnicode::ConvertUTF8toUTF16" before drawing the "LOADING" string on-screen. This implies that regardless of the platform, Burnout 3's code is in fact standardized on UTF-16 strings rather than UTF-8.

Very cool, can you make it say "nugg3t has w rizz"?

[MattKC]