[http://sourceforge.net/p/ufoai/bugs/2342 Item 2342] imported from sourceforge.net tracker on 2013-01-28 19:30:37

When I launch the game for the first time, it comes up in a 1024x768 window, with an "Initial Settings" dialog centered in the middle. While filling out the screen, I accidentally move the mouse cursor over the language dropdown. Unexpectedly, it opens -- which is non-standard behavior for a dropdown in Windows (and pretty much any other UI I've used). Apparently, the dropdown would have closed if I had moved the mouse off, but not knowing this, I click on the dropdown's little arrow; in any other UI, this would close the dropdown, but in this UI it inexplicably selects the first item in the list: Japanese. Instantly, nearly all text in the application turns into little boxes -- including the names of the languages. So I randomly choose another language in the dropdown, hoping for something that at least supports my fonts. And I am in luck: the Russian translation didn't even bother translating the names of the languages. But this does not help me, because UFO:AI supports so many languages that the dropdown goes off the bottom of the screen; only the first 12 or so languages are visible. Presumably English is down there somewhere -- but I can't tell because the dropdown has no scrollbars, and the control is not reachable by keyboard (tabbing actually cycles focus to random other controls, including those in the window behind the dialog, for some reason). Regardless of the number of translations included, I'm only able to select one of the first 12 of an arbitrarily ordered list, none of which intersect my limited repertoire of English and German. At this point, I don't want to press the "OK" button, since I have no idea if the game will let me change my language options later (and I don't know how I'd find such an option, given that I won't be able to read anything). So I click on the red "X" in the window corner to close the game and try again. But this must have somehow told the game to save invalid configuration data, since the game crashes on subsequent launches.

(I managed to get the game running again by deleting the UFOAI folder in the Application Data directory in the user's profile, but no normal user is going to be able to figure that out. I have since been unable to reproduce the invalid configuration data that causes a crash on launch. However, I notice that the language that the user chooses is saved, even if they don't click OK.)

So, I have the following recommendations:
- Change the dropdown box to work like other UIs (open/close on click, select an item only when the item is clicked on, with scrollbars to view/select items that don't fit, maybe with keyboard support).
- Display languages as they appear in their own language. Bug ID 2820332 talks about doing this with complicated font manipulations, but really you only need images of the language names.
- Sort languages by some standard.
- Reset the configuration data if the user kills the program before clicking OK, so that an undesired language selection is not saved.

As a temporary measure, I suggest making English the first language in the list, not Japanese.

I am running Windows XP Professional 64, and the string in the corner of the UFO AI window says "UFO: Alien Invasion 2.2.1 x86 Apr 28 2008 RELEASE".
===== Comments Ported from Sourceforge =====

====== geever (2010-02-04 07:12:18) ======

The interface changed since 2.2.x.

-geever