Unicode Characters Are Not Properly Displayed on Linux

May 1, 2020

Pending

When any Unicode character (e.g. Cyrillic, CJK unified ideograph, miscellaneous symbol, etc) is being mixed with ASCII character (e.g. space character, 32nd character of ASCII table) in any place in the game, e.g. chat, server name, server description, etc, they become broken and unreadable.

Cf. two screenshots provided below (fig. 1, fig. 2).

fig1.png.c7a2671d0b501e3264915bf8c4aad4a0.png
Fig. 1 — Unicode characters sent to chat alone

fig2.png.2c2f6c60a355e6aa1b7e2c8252183373.png
Fig. 2 — Unicode characters sent to chat mixed with non-Unicode characters

The first message (fig. 1) contains word "тест" ("test") written using Cyrillic characters which is visible clearly, as it is solely a word which contains Unicode characters only, which isn't mixed with any other ASCII characters.

Now, the second message (fig. 2) contains "тест with English characters" sentence, first word of which didn't change, and is the same as shown in fig. 1. It is obviously different from the first message, however taking a closer look at the image, you can see that the original word "тест" ("test") is still there, it's just obstructed with artifacts for whatever reason.

It appears to me that there is a problem in the way game handles font rendering on Linux-based operating systems.

Having this bug in the game makes multiplayer games hard to play as most of the time it's impossible to tell what sentence one person is trying to tell me, so I require Klei to take immediate actions to fix the problem.

Steps to Reproduce

Install Arch Linux or Manjaro OS.
Depending on your hardware, install proprietary Nvidia drivers, or open-source Intel/AMD drivers otherwise.
Download Steam and install Don't Starve Together.
Launch Don't Starve Together from Steam.
Join any server or host your own.
Copy and paste the following sentences in the chat:
1. "тест" — this will be displayed without any issues.
2. "тест with English characters" — this will display the first word of the sentence with artifacts obstructing it.