Let's Pin Down the Zakuul Font!

[idnewton]

Well I'm pretty big on fonts, I've already learned Aurebesh, Sith, Mandalorian and I've started to learn Futhork. When I saw a new-looking font on Zakuul, that was naturally a significant interest for me. Since it doesn't appear to match any existing Star Wars fonts, I'm creating this thread so hopefully between various community members, we can get more pictures of the uses of this text and hopefully identify which letters are what. If Bioware could just tell us by giving us a character sheet, that'd be best, but otherwise I'll do what I can to identify the letters that are being used (since presumably we'll still be missing some less-common letters like Q, X and perhaps J, though I imagine Z will be rather common as this is Zakuul).

 

Here's what I've screenshotted so far:

Pic 1

Pic 2

 

The first word in the second picture seems like it could be "the", though that's pure speculation.

 

In each of these two pictures, there are repeat letters, and there are not repeated patters of letters, so it does stand to reason that these are actual letters (and presumably words) rather than just gibberish decoration.

 

The trick is to watch for key patterns that strongly suggest words. For example, if anyone finds a 123445 pattern (each number value relating to a separate random symbol) that would HEAVILY suggest the word "Zakuul" since we're on the planet and it has the two identical letters in the 3rd-to-last and second-to-last spot.

Edited October 27, 2015 by idnewton

[idnewton]

Then we have these two, which sadly suggest that BW (for whatever stupid reason they usually have) decided to flip the orientation of the text.

 

Pic 3

Pic 4

 

That's usually not a problem for the fonts in the game, but that's because we already have those fonts outside of SWTOR. Now, it'll be incredibly difficult to identify which is the flipped and which is the normal. I'm GUESSING that the orientation of the first two pics is the correct orientation, because it's be wierd to have those inclined lines sloping down (left to right) rather than up, cause it'd too closely resemble an N.

[DAWUSS]

I'm GUESSING that the orientation of the first two pics is the correct orientation, because it's be wierd to have those inclined lines sloping down (left to right) rather than up, cause it'd too closely resemble an N.

 

N vs. И

[idnewton]

There's also some text on Arcann's robes and there's some on the computers, but I forgot to take screenshots of those. I'll have to do that sometime soon.

[Diviciacus]

Keep in mind there's no reason each character in this Zakuul writing system corresponds to a single grapheme in English also. They could represent only consonants (like Semitic written languages), or phonemes or even entire words (like Mandarin). Edited October 22, 2015 by Diviciacus

[idnewton]

Keep in mind there's no reason each character in this Zakuul writing system corresponds to a single grapheme in English also. They could represent only consonants (like Semitic written languages), or phonemes or even entire words (like Mandarin).

 

Unprecedented for Star Wars fonts. The closest it's ever gotten is Aurebesh where there are extra characters for English letter combinations (of two letters) -- but I doubt that much effort was put into it, nor needed to be put into it.

[benovide]

Give you a hint, that's a real Earth Language.... Dig deep, dig into the eastern Mediterranean areas.........

[idnewton]

Give you a hint, that's a real Earth Language.... Dig deep, dig into the eastern Mediterranean areas.........

 

I saw something which looked an awful lot like it, but it didn't have a fair number of the same characters.

[SlimyFoghorn]

Give you a hint, that's a real Earth Language.... Dig deep, dig into the eastern Mediterranean areas.........

 

I'm guessing it could be Phoenician, but I could be wrong.

Now that I think of it, it also looks a bit like some form of Old Norse.

Edited October 26, 2015 by SlimyFoghorn

[idnewton]

Now that I think of it, it also looks a bit like some form of Old Norse.

Yes, that's the one I found. It seems to draw primarily from that, but there are clear differences. It'd be like saying the Sith font is the Hebrew alphabet. It's not. It draws heavily from the Hebrew alphabet, but it is not the Hebrew alphabet.

 

Anyway, the point of this thread is for people to post more screenshots of instances of this font (especially those computers at the end of Chapter 7, which I missed), and ultimately decipher the font (assuming BW doesn't step in and do it for us). However, given the heavy influence of old norse, I'm guessing that screenshots 3 and 4 are in the correct direction, and that 1 and 2 are actually the horizontally-flipped ones. I really hate it when BW does that, but I think we've solved that part of it.

Edited October 26, 2015 by idnewton

[AshlaBoga]

Yes, that's the one I found. It seems to draw primarily from that, but there are clear differences. It'd be like saying the Sith font is the Hebrew alphabet. It's not. It draws heavily from the Hebrew alphabet, but it is not the Hebrew alphabet.

 

Anyway, the point of this thread is for people to post more screenshots of instances of this font (especially those computers at the end of Chapter 7, which I missed), and ultimately decipher the font (assuming BW doesn't step in and do it for us). However, given the heavy influence of old norse, I'm guessing that screenshots 3 and 4 are in the correct direction, and that 1 and 2 are actually the horizontally-flipped ones. I really hate it when BW does that, but I think we've solved that part of it.

 

Hmm, I always like thinking about Force User civilizations and mythology, now if Jedi are sort of Warrior Monks, and Sith are a hodgepodge of Nazis/Satanists/lotsofstuff and Night Sisters are heavily voodo inspired, does that mean Zakuul is a Norse/Roman combo? I say Roman because the who Praetorian guard thing reminds me of Rome more than anything Norse.

[Diviciacus]

Hmm, I always like thinking about Force User civilizations and mythology, now if Jedi are sort of Warrior Monks, and Sith are a hodgepodge of Nazis/Satanists/lotsofstuff and Night Sisters are heavily voodo inspired, does that mean Zakuul is a Norse/Roman combo? I say Roman because the who Praetorian guard thing reminds me of Rome more than anything Norse.

 

Just for the record, "praetorian" comes from praetor, which is an agent noun meaning "one who goes first." While in Roman times, "Praetorian guard" referred to the bodyguards of the Emperor, they also exist in modern political structures as well. I live in Canada, and the personal body guards of the Prime Minister are also called "Praetorian Guards."

 

While it's likely they got the idea from the Roman Empire, having the name without its associated historical context is not without precedent.

[idnewton]

Hmm, I always like thinking about Force User civilizations and mythology, now if Jedi are sort of Warrior Monks, and Sith are a hodgepodge of Nazis/Satanists/lotsofstuff and Night Sisters are heavily voodo inspired, does that mean Zakuul is a Norse/Roman combo? I say Roman because the who Praetorian guard thing reminds me of Rome more than anything Norse.

 

Well, what I've realized is, even though this IS undoubtedly its own font, it's possible several of the shared letters are the same... that would certainly help decipher the alphabet faster.

[idnewton]

I've gotten about 25-30 screenshots... what I've discovered (which looks obvious now, but wasn't so clear going in) is that the best way to detect how/when the Zakuul font is flipped/turn/switched around is to look at the Aurebesh, if it accompanies it (which it often does). That way, you can detect whether the devs just took the entire texture and flipped/rotated it to add more variety. As a result, I've definitely narrowed it down a bit.

 

As a random first character, I'm going to conclusively say that the : : character is a period. That one's pretty easy though since there are three in a row at the end of some words, and one at the end of others. That one's simple. When I find the time, I'll condense all the CONFIRMED and VALIDATED (with the aforementioned method) characters and hopefully come up with 26 or under. Then I can make some solid progress on figuring them out. Based on where/when it shows up, I think the weird overlapping X (with the < symbol) character, second from the left, on the top line of Pic 3, is "E". Granted I think it's flipped in that picture, but still, that's the character (flipped or not) but again I'll verify things like this after I solidify the known alphabet from the validated pics I have.

[idnewton]

Well, PART of the problem is that the font used in Pic 1 and 2 appears to be a 'fancy' variant of the other font... or possibly the other one appears to be a more rigid version. Either way, there are two SEPARATE versions going on here... I see letters in the fancy one that I haven't been able to locate in the rigid one, like the И with two lines going through the middle.

[Celise]

i initially suspected cyrillic because of the zhe (7th letter from the left, near the middle) but discounted it. i also discounted, old turkic, south arabian, old italic, syriac, aramaic, and phoenician all based on a hunch, however it formed what would be my next hunch. my next hunch lead me to runic symbols (because of stargate sg-1 "Thor's Chariot"), the problem is that there were numerous runic languages operating back in the medieval days. i strongly suspect old hungarian and futhark runes the most. interestingly enough old hungarian is based partly off syriac and old turkic anyway, so i was not far off the mark. the futhark runes are based off the old italic stuff and both are a direct decendant of phoenician lettering which probably why it threw a few people off.

 

what you are looking at are runic symbols some of them are letters at least one of them is probably a number.

Edited October 27, 2015 by Celise

[idnewton]

Solved.

 

The problem was, there are actually four variants. There's Fancy and Rigid, yes, but there's also what I'm calling "Old Zakuul" and "New Zakuul", which has a few letter differences (the A, B, C, Y and Z are different). I'm still missing X, J and Q (simply because I haven't found them ingame yet) and there could theoretically be more letter changes between Old and New Zakuul which I may discover, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

 

There are numbers in the text, but I was always aware of where they were, so I was able to avoid that confusion.

 

 

Before I start, I want to mention as a disclaimer that any instance of THIS picture and of THIS picture is a flipped version of what appears ingame. I was able to identify that the text ingame is itself flipped, so I used paint to flip it again (revert it to what it should be).

 

This section belongs to the letters which, to my knowledge, are shared between Old Zakuul and New Zakuul. All of these characters depicted are from the Rigid font (I'll get to Fancy a bit later).

D

E

F

G

H

I

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

U

V

W

 

Now let's observe the differences between Old and New Zakuul.

Old Zakuul A

New Zakuul A

Old Zakuul B

New Zakuul B

Old Zakuul C

New Zakuul C

Old Zakuul Y

New Zakuul Y

Old Zakuul Z

New Zakuul Z

 

Now let me show you the differences I've seen so far between Rigid and Fancy.

Fancy D (pretty similar though the bottom protrusion is curved)

Fancy F

Fancy L

Fancy M

Fancy O

Fancy R

Fancy S

Fancy T

 

 

Now let's take a look at our progress on numbers so far. Credit for spearheading this effort goes to Crinolo, who found a VERY important computer monitor which had a lot of good stuff, including the Rigid New B, previously thought to be the same as the Rigid Old B.

Rigid New 1

Rigid New 2

Rigid New 3

Rigid New 4

Rigid New 5

Rigid New 6

Rigid New 8

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 

Now let's look at some instances of the text ingame, and figure out what they say.

 

Picture 1 -- [FANCY; OLD]:

Administration

 

Picture 2 -- [FANCY; NEW]:

RNG Main Office (how do you like that for an easter egg? Also, as for the stuff below it, those are numbers, and I see no way I'll ever be able to decipher which is which, unless we get building floor levels or something).

 

Picture 3 -- [RIGID; OLD]:

Twin Rails

Subway

 

Picture 4 -- [RIGID; OLD]:

Zakuul

Undercity

 

Picture 5 -- [RIGID; NEW]:

Recharge

 

Picture 6 -- [RIGID; EITHER (uses only shared characters) presumably NEW since picture 5 is of the same monitor model]:

Full Power

 

Picture 7 (and the other part, for line 3) -- [RIGID; NEW]:

At full power.

Will proceed as scheduled...

Pending approval.

(bottom right corner) All systems active

 

Picture 8 -- [RIGID; NEW]:

Current Prices

 

Picture 9 -- [RIGID; NEW]:

Weapon Upgrades

 

Picture 10 -- [RIGID; NEW]:

Strongholds ( how odd that they would mention this... I wonder if that's a hint of something to come)

 

Picture 11 -- [RIGID; NEW]:

Systems

Resources

 

Picture 12 -- [FANCY; NEW]:

LOCALGOODS

 

 

*tips fedora* m'font.

 

 

Edited 10/27/15 at 4:13 PM PDT -- Reason: Updated post to include my discovery of a New Zakuul Z, meaning that the previously-assumed shared Z was not in fact shared, but rather the Old Zakuul variant.

 

Edited on 8/28/16 at 4:48 AM PDT -- Reason: Updated post to include Crinolo's discovery of the Rigid New B and several numbers, and my discovery of the Fancy L. PS: My assumption now, given that the only differences between Old and New come from A, B, C, Y, and Z, and I haven't found X, I think it's a reasonable presumption that X could very well be different in Old and New.

Edited August 28, 2016 by idnewton

[Starhammer]

Thank you very much Idnewton. I'd gotten a lot of this figured already, but you filled a few holes I still had.

 

For what it's worth, there's also a vertical neon sign in a few places that says MARKET STATION. No major variations in the fonts as seen otherwise, but a different representation of them at least.

[idnewton]

Thank you very much Idnewton. I'd gotten a lot of this figured already, but you filled a few holes I still had.

 

For what it's worth, there's also a vertical neon sign in a few places that says MARKET STATION. No major variations in the fonts as seen otherwise, but a different representation of them at least.

 

NP. Yup, I noticed that sign too. It's yellow/orange, vertical, next to a lift and in a few other places?

 

 

I took a look at Arcann's robe when doing a quick blaze-through of chapters 1 through 4. It was a bit distorted as you might imagine a robe would be... it appeared to be using Fancy but I think it was Fancy New and whatever it was, it had a LOT of characters I hadn't seen. It might be its own version (like Fancy "Royal" or something) but I'll have to spend some more time on it to make sure. Also, I'm not too concerned with figuring out the Fancy variant anyway since it doesn't appear anywhere as much as Rigid, so it'll take much longer to pin down (if it ever can be pinned down).

Edited November 2, 2015 by idnewton

[Starhammer]

NP. Yup, I noticed that sign too. It's yellow/orange, vertical, next to a lift and in a few other places?

 

 

I took a look at Arcann's robe when doing a quick blaze-through of chapters 1 through 4. It was a bit distorted as you might imagine a robe would be... it appeared to be using Fancy but I think it was Fancy New and whatever it was, it had a LOT of characters I hadn't seen. It might be its own version (like Fancy "Royal" or something) but I'll have to spend some more time on it to make sure. Also, I'm not too concerned with figuring out the Fancy variant anyway since it doesn't appear anywhere as much as Rigid, so it'll take much longer to pin down (if it ever can be pinned down).

 

Yeah, that robe is gonna be a monster cipher by comparison to the rest, since it may be a modified font, different parts may be inverted, upside down, or folded, and we can't really tell where any words begin or end, if they are in fact even words. Of course, that just means I'll spend more of the subscription time I have trying to figure it out instead of grinding credits to buy more armor sets for "Space Barbie Dress-Up" like I should be...

[idnewton]

grinding credits to buy more armor sets for "Space Barbie Dress-Up"

lol

 

I'm not too concerned with it. If memory serves (which it often doesn't), I think it was Fancy, which doesn't really help me. I've been writing in Rigid New so far, so whether I switch over to Fancy or not is something I still haven't decided. However, since we haven't seen anywhere as much Fancy as we have Rigid, we don't know which other letters also have Fancy versions (I saw a few other new Fancy letters in passing, though I forgot to include them here).

 

I hope someone like erikstormtrooper (if he/she is even still around) will make a font of a Zakuul variant (preferrably Rigid New as that's what shows up on the Zakuul computers I've seen, at least the up-to-date ones (rather than the outdated systems in the Old City).

 

However, since we still don't know J, Q or X, that may not really be worth it yet. Also, we do know numbers exist, but as mentioned, I don't know if we'll ever be able to pin down which is which.

[SteveTheCynic]

Pedantic points:

 

1. They are not fonts. They are scripts. Granted, you could say that the writing you see everywhere on the 1-50 planets are fonts because they map 1:1 onto the language of your localisation. Not onto English, but the current localisation - the names of stuff on the Galactic travel maps when you zoom into a planet or ship map nicely onto the name in your localisation of the destination, but that doesn't change the fact that linguistically they are *scripts*.

 

2. The runes on Thexan's armour are indeed runes, not Hebrew letters(1). They seem to be a mix of Elder Futhark, Marcomannian, and Younger Futhark runes, except that many are upside down, reflected left-right or reflected up-down. Trying to use runic equivalences to transliterate them into the Latin alphabet might not work very well as a result. I tried (briefly), and failed. (I don't have the patience to actually go any further than I did.)

 

(1) Really. There's no mistaking Hebrew letters from a stylistic point of view. My wife put it best: they all look like they have little candle flames. The stuff on Thexan's armour does not have that look.

[noraaurstad]

In chapter 3 it says i should access the emergecy lift, it opens, but it refuses to do anything and the mission still tells me that i need to access the emergency lift. bug? how do i get around that?

[SteveTheCynic]

In chapter 3 it says i should access the emergecy lift, it opens, but it refuses to do anything and the mission still tells me that i need to access the emergency lift. bug? how do i get around that?

Keep going.

 

 

You'll reach another door. Open that, to reveal the room where the lift actually is.

 

 

And a big fight.

 

[idnewton]

Pedantic points:

 

1. They are not fonts. They are scripts. Granted, you could say that the writing you see everywhere on the 1-50 planets are fonts because they map 1:1 onto the language of your localisation. Not onto English, but the current localisation - the names of stuff on the Galactic travel maps when you zoom into a planet or ship map nicely onto the name in your localisation of the destination, but that doesn't change the fact that linguistically they are *scripts*.

Wrong. They are typefaces.

 

 

2. The runes on Thexan's armour are indeed runes, not Hebrew letters(1). They seem to be a mix of Elder Futhark, Marcomannian, and Younger Futhark runes, except that many are upside down, reflected left-right or reflected up-down. Trying to use runic equivalences to transliterate them into the Latin alphabet might not work very well as a result. I tried (briefly), and failed. (I don't have the patience to actually go any further than I did.)

 

(1) Really. There's no mistaking Hebrew letters from a stylistic point of view. My wife put it best: they all look like they have little candle flames. The stuff on Thexan's armour does not have that look.

First, we're talking about Arcann's robe, not Thexan's. Second, no one claimed they were Hebrew. They are clearly the Fancy Old "typeface"

 

I'm honestly not sure why you bothered commenting, since everything you said was wrong