Help!: Renaming Cities and Certain Diacritics; Is it even possible?

I like renaming cities to reflect their language of origin. For example, in my game Austria's capital is Wien instead of Vienna, Cologne becomes Köln and Copenhagen becomes København. Leaving aside romanisation issues, the main problem arises when I come across languages that use certain diacritics. For example, Osaka, according to my preferred romanisation system, is spelled Ōsaka, with a macron. But since macrons won't show up in-game despite being utf-8 characters, I can choose to either keep it as Osaka or Oosaka, both of which I find unsatisfactory. Also, I've noticed that the eszett (ß) will appear on screen messages, e.g. "Preßburg has grown!", but the name above the city will only display "Pressburg".

Is there any way I can change how the game displays city names through editing files or mods? Is it even possible? My knowledge of coding is quite limited but nonethless, any input would be appreciated, thanks!

You will need to search through the game files for the tags but the code to change the name should be something like this.

Thanks Wolfdog. I probably should've been clearer in my original post but I've already done what you are suggesting; in fact, that's how I've been changing the city names in the first place. The problem is when I type in characters with certain diacritics, even though everything seems fine in the code, a blank space shows up in its stead when I play the game.

Here's an example with attachments to illustrate what I mean.
According to the Revised Hepburn romanisation system, Kyoto is spelled Kyōto. So that's what I changed the code accordingly:


But when I go to play as Japan, here's what happens:

(I've added attachments of the pictures in case they don't show up)

Macrons aren't the only diacritcs affected; breves, dots below letters, carons over consonants and combination of two diacritics, even with ones that appear in-game, don't appear as well. Granted, it's possible that some of these characters don't appear in utf-8 format but according to this site, the majority of them do: http://www.fileformat.info/info/charset/UTF-8/list.htm

So then why can't these characters show up in game? And is it possible to change something in the game's files so that they will appear?

I think I read somewhere, something about the Civ5 fonts being bitmapped, so if they don't exist in there in that form, they simply won't show up.

(Found the thread here - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=500249 )

Personally, at least for the Japanese names, I gravitate toward how I would normally type them out via the IME.

Thanks DarkScythe, that thread helped get a better understanding of the problem. I'm still not satisfied though . I've done some searching and found this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=475446

Someone named bazilikas in that thread was able to get Turkish characters to appear in vanilla Civ 5! But because of my lack of knowledge of modding, I don't know how he/she's done it. The thread's about two years old now and I don't know if G&K or BNW has obsoleted whatever method he/she used, but if anybody can shed some light on how they did it, I'd be super grateful! I know the Turkish alphabet doesn't use macrons, but if I could get the same result bazilikas got, I think I'd be satisfied.

Note that bazilikas had G+K. That method and the one Paz mentions should both still work, i.e.,
drop an XML file, doesn't matter the name, with the contents:

Pazyryk said:

Code:

<GameData>
	<Languages>
		<Update>
			<Set UseExtendedFont ="1" FontName="Tahoma" FontWidthScale="0.4" FontHeightScale="0.8"/>
			<Where Type="en_US" />
		</Update>
	</Languages>
</GameData>

Click to expand...

in the folder: C:\Users\%username%\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\Text\

OMG It worked! I realised I've been putting the xml into the wrong Text folder (I thought they were talking about ...Program Files\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\Assets\Gameplay\XML\Text lol.
The best part is, after playing around a bit, I've discovered that changing the localisation has made essentially all special characters available, not just the ones found in the Turkish alphabet! Which means I get my macrons!!
The only drawback is that I'll have to get used to the Tahoma font, but that's hardly an issue.
Thanks everyone for your help! I cannot begin to express how satisfying this has made Civ for me!

Unfortunately, the use of UseExtendedFont ="1" in the Text folder (above) results in fonts that are not bitmapped. I found it tolerable at first but changed my mind after a week or so. They really look awful compared to bitmapped and it starts to wear on you after a while.

Alikalix developed an extended bitmapped font set that we're using in Éa. It has ß and macrons and other accent types and markings (e.g., &#268 that you don't have in base (but not double markings as far as I know). You can use it if you give credit to Alikalix (and PMing him might be nice to).

I don't know how Alikalix made these dds files. I asked him to explain it or write a tutorial, but it's a little tough due to a language barrier. If someone here speaks Polish, that might help.

The bad news is that (as I explained here) you can't just replace the TwCenMT font set. You have to add the new font set with a different name (I use EaTwCnMT) and then change every occurrence of "TwCenMT" with "EaTwCnMT" in every UI xml file where you want the new font set to be used. That was OK in our total conversion mod, but a real mess for modularity otherwise. If someone knows a different way to do it (that doesn't involve replacing >60 xml files), please let me know.

The font set is actually in Éa Media Pack (find ggxml and dds files in the Fonts folder) which you can get to from our Downloads thread (follow the link in my sig).