A rant regarding the online world's lack of support for the Cyrillic alphabet.

how hard is it? definitely not as easy as you think, and i can tell that from experience

I've implemented unicode support into original Xbox homebrew. It's not impossible. It's likely harder on a multiplayer game's scale, but still, certainly not impossible, and pretty excluding for those who Russian is their only language.

For me... Latin alphabet or go home! ;D

@linuxares B.. But I am home. Plus the Latin alphabet gets on my nerves a lot.

Yeah... Let's all go for Kanji because why not

@linuxares I could name several reasons, but I'd rather not get into it. There's not really a "perfect" alphabet, but I am very partial to Cyrillic.. Although there's no representation for 'J' and 'W', but whatever.

As a fellow Russian, I feel for you. The thing that annoys me more about the implementation of Cyrillic is that there are 20 bajillion ways to encode it like CP1251, DOS866 and so on, whilst basic Latin gets coded almost the same in any encoding...and sure, in a perfect world everything should be UTF-8 but sadly we're far from it. I've seen some websites messed up actually because of them switching from CP1251 to UTF-8 but not reencoding the pages...really, text encoding outside of basic Latin is a pain to deal with.
And I have another gripe with how many western fonts lack support for Cyrillic characters, whilst a lot of Japanese fonts do have them but they're all monowidth, so you have to fix the fonts to be able to type with them...

Yeah, it's quite upsetting. I thought the Unicode standard was made to, well, standardize one method of text encoding across most all devices, yet it's honestly more uncommon to see UTF-8 implemented than some older counterpart. Y'know, thus the concept of UNIcode, one-code, right?

Yesss, that's been an enormous annoyance to me as well. Typing Cyrillic onto a page or chat or what-have-you and seeing it in a drastically different, very stilted and odd font, usually weirdly compressed, blurry and/or strangely spaced. Это вот болит.

Well, what Unicode has achieved is being a dump of all possible text characters in the world, that's about it...if they wanted to standardize text encoding, there should've been UTF-8 and UTF-8 only...I can make a guess UTF-16 and such were created for simplifying coding programs since handling UTF-8 isn't as straightforward thanks to it being a variable width encoding scheme...but then again advocating for UTF-16 is like saying wchar should be used over char...well, we can somewhat thank Microsoft for wide adoption of UTF-16 and the codepage BS for the most part ("embrace, extend, extinguish", huh...not quite on the extinguish phase here, but they had a lot of influence in popularizing UTF-16 tho).
And also another thing that just came to mind is how some programs on the PC aren't coded to support file paths with characters outside the ASCII range...sure, this is much less common to see nowadays, but some old programs have this issue and it's quite annoying and gets on your nerves when it happens...the most recent example of this I can think of is Cemu, cause I remember that darn emulator not loading any games on any version and only later I realized that was thanks to the file path having Cyrillic characters in it.
As for hacking text in games (especially ones using Ninty's NintendoWare libraries), you can either pray for the game being UTF-16(and despite me not thinking much good of UTF-16, it's still a nice thing to have over replacing Latin characters with Cyrillic to get all the needed letters) or SJIS if you want to cleanly implement Cyrillic...cause guess what Ninty devs thought UTF-8 is the same as ASCII, so their binary font format limits the character range for UTF-8 coding to 8-bit range *facepalm*.

Ahhh, yeah. Trying to get stuff like C3ConTools and 360ContentManager to play nice with any Cyrillic folders is, erh.. not fun.

Oh, Gosh. Yeah. I prefer to have my games and consoles in the language I'm more comfortable in, yet since I'm in the US, it's usually English, Spanish, French, or nothing. This is slightly less of an issue with modern consoles and games as worldwide releases and lack of region locking simultaneously becoming more common, but it's definitely still present today. (Especially on Nintendo's software. I figured they'd be better at this by now.)

The Original Xbox being a huge offender to this, although it's one of my favorite consoles of all time, it refuses Cyrillic text like a toddler refusing nap-time. You basically have to just put the text in image files and have it load that rather than having it try to encode and display text. It wouldn't work for more dynamic situations, but it worked for what I needed it to do.

While I speak only basic Russian, and most definitely not on a daily basis, I can sympathize with your issue for a very simple reason: my first language is European Portuguese, so we use a lot of accented vowels (á, à, é, í, ú, ó, â, ê, ô, ã, õ) and, occasionally, "ç". While these are obviously part of Unicode and most expanded Latin scripts, they are not part of ASCII. My first name is "José" (pronounced with a French J for you English speakers, not with an H as the Spanish version). While I just type it without the acute accent in most of the English speaking internet for usernames and the like, my computers are in Portuguese, and I use my actual name as a username. Good for the most part, but some programs, as mentioned above, require ASCII paths. So I frequently have those crap out on me because of a damned "é".

Huh, I'm not that familiar with hacking things on Xbox, as I'm mostly a Ninty guy (definitely weird to be such in Russia lol as most other people are into Xbox and PlayStation) and even then most of my efforts have been on 1st/2nd party games, but yeah it's terrible that the og Xbox has that issue.
Although at some point I preferred to play and watch stuff in my native language as well, I just had to put up with the fact that I'll have to consume most of the content in English...and it's for various reasons, such as not all games getting translated to Russian (even Ninty's 1st party titles are a hit and miss), or the fact that the Ninty community is almost nonexistent here(and from what I could observe, even more toxic than the global gaming community...cause almost every single post on VK by Nintendo is commented with "gonna buy your stupid games when you translate them to our language" and generally most comments have some toxicity to them) so I'd much rather play stuff in English to not have to look up the proper names online. Nintendo's thing of region locking is in fact very annoying...and is also weird at times as well, cause even with the Switch despite lacking any region lock, there do exist regional variants of some games, like Splatoon 2 for example...so I wanted to try playing it in Japanese (cause I'm learning it atm), but it was in English despite switching the system to Japanese, cause apparently I have a Russian cart (the three last letters on the SKU are "RUS")...why can't they make international carts with all the languages still beats me to this day...one major annoyance for me for playing in English tho, is having to put up with imperial units a lot of the time...cause despite English being an international language, a lot of the time apparently imperial units are more "international" than metric (or at least that's what the localization teams think I guess). Additionally as someone who likes to translate stuff, I'm very picky about translations...it's an unpopular opinion, but I like the approach of translating texts more literally to what's said in the original, rather than heavily editing it to sound more literature-ish (which I thing deserves to be called "отсебятина" XD)...so this leaves me getting angry at the translations a lot of the time instead of enjoying the game. Again, not saying the official translations are bad in any way, but I'm just not a big fan of how it's done in general.

And yeah with the file paths, I've just come to the conclusion that it's just better to have everything in Latin to avoid any potential issues that might arise...not to mention, I'm annoyed at having to press Shift+Alt all the time to switch between keyboard layouts, so the less layout switching I have to do the better for me...it's gone to a point where despite taking and writing in Russian in daily life all the time, I'm much better at typing in English than Russian since that's what I have to use the most.