Flags as Unicode emojis ?

[danim7]

I was trying to add the country flags to the server window, and for that specific part of the code, I realized it will be much easier to add them as Unicode emojis rather than displaying the bitmaps icons, as in done for clients.

A quick and dirty test can be found here, so far flags are only displayed when connecting / pinging the server: https://github.com/danim7/amule/tree/flags-as-emojis

The possible benefits of using emojis rather than bundling our own icons are:

• no need to include the ~250 icons, we just rely on the system fonts, lighter repository
• simpler implementation in code, maybe even slightly better perf than playing with bitmaps

But there may be a big drawback:

• Apparently, Windows system don't include the flags..? can someone confirm this point?

So just asking for opinions before spending more time in this direction

[got3nks]

Confirmed on Windows: Microsoft doesn't render Regional Indicator Symbol pairs as flags (they show as letter-boxes — "US", "DE", etc.). The stated reason is political. Unchanged on Windows 11 24H2.

Since that effectively rules out emoji as a cross-platform solution (we'd either ship Twemoji on Windows or branch the renderer per-platform — both of which complicate rather than simplify), one alternative that captures your two stated benefits without the Windows regression:

SVG-based flag icons via wxBitmapBundle::FromSVGFile (wxWidgets 3.2+):

• Replaces the ~250 individual PNGs with one SVG per country (or a combined sprite). Public-domain / permissive sources exist — flag-icons (MIT) and Twemoji SVG (CC-BY 4.0) both ship a full country set.
• Bundle size drops: SVGs are typically smaller than equivalent PNGs, and a single SVG covers every DPI — no more @2x / @3x variants.
• HiDPI / Retina sharpness comes for free; wxBitmapBundle rasterises at the display's actual pixel density.
• Renderer side is simpler than the current bitmap-list dance — same shape as your emoji idea, just on a different source format.
• Identical rendering on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

This is the modernisation path I'd lean toward over emoji — same code-side simplification, smaller bundle, sharper on HiDPI, no Windows asterisk.

[danim7]

Thanks for the feedback. What I feared, we cannot rely on fonts to have the flags. We may study the SVG idea for a future, low-priority, modernisation.