[cpp] Correct way to load from unicode folders

mikedmc

I couldn't find a way to load the spine assets from cpp when starting the game from a path that has Chinese characters in it (or any other non basic ASCII characters). All paths are passed around the code using char or your Str implementation that's based on char and std::string too.

Is there a way to load the assets from Chinese named paths? What would be the easiest way to do it?

P.S.: As I see it, only the Atlas class needs to be changed because all the constructors ask for the atlas path in order to pass it on to the custom texture loader. Should we make our own changes?

Mario

spine-cpp uses UTF-8 throughout the entire API. I've tested loading from chinese paths using spine-cpp and spine-sfml on macOS, which works as intended.

What operating system are you trying this on? If there is use of std::string in our runtimes we need to eliminate it. Could you link to the place in our runtimes where you found std::string?

mikedmc

I could only find std::string in spine::RTTI (I'm using the 3.7 branch).

For the other that might stumble upon this issue:
I'm saving paths in WCHAR arrays (Windows) and when using the Atlas constructor that asks for the full atlas path in char, (even after I convert it to UTF8) it still refused to load the .atlas file (problems when parsing for the last backslash, didn't investigate a lot why it wasn't loading it).
In order to avoid this I used the constructor that asks for the file data array and size and I'm just passing an empty string in the dir param to "force" the Atlas loader to pass along the unmodified image names to the custom texture loader (no folder concatenations and other processing that the constructor does). The texture loader is the one that concatenates the path to the received image file name to create the final file path.
I hope that makes sense.

bool CSpineManager::LoadAtlas(WCHAR * wcsFolder, WCHAR * wcsFile)
{
   WCHAR wcsPath[MAX_PATH];
   StringCchPrintf(wcsPath, MAX_PATH, L"%s%s", wcsFolder, wcsFile);

   int buffSize = 0;
   char* buff = OS_readFileToBuffer(wcsPath, buffSize);
   if (buff == null)
   {
      ErrorBox(K_ERR_WARNING, L"[WARNING]CSpineManager::LoadAtlas - file not found: %s", wcsPath);
      return false;
   }
   //set prefix for the tex loader so it knows where to load the images from (it will only receive the filenames without folder)
   m_TexMgr->SetFilesPrefix(wcsFolder);
   //load with empty "dir" param so it doesn't process the filenames
   m_atlas = new Atlas(buff, buffSize, "", m_TexMgr);
   //release file buffer
   SAFE_DELETE_ARRAY(buff);
   // check atlas loaded - could be smthg like m_atlas.IsLoaded()...?
   if (m_atlas.getPages().size() == 0)
   {
      delete m_atlas;
      ErrorBox(K_ERR_WARNING, L"[WARNING]CSpineManager::LoadAtlas - couldn't load atlas: %s", wcsPath);
      return false;
   }
   return true;
}