hi!! im new to ukgk, i was wondering if theres something i could do to fix my teruno's dialogue options being all question marks whenever i talk to her?
Hello! I don't think I've heard of dialogue being specifically converted to question marks before, as opposed to mojibake. I don't actually have Teruno, so I don't know what specifically the issue might be.
What I can say is that there are two common causes of the dialogue being messed up.
If the ghost is written in Satori, you may need to update the satori.dll file, which can fix various bugs that cause mojibake.
Verify the ghost you want to update is using Satori. To do this, navigate to the folder where SSP is installed, then go into the ghost folder. Find the folder for the specific ghost you're using, and then inside that folder go to ghost/master/. If you see a file called satori.dll in there, then it's a ghost made with Satori. If you do not see satori.dll, and instead you see another dll such as yaya.dll, shiori.dll, or aosora.dll, this fix will not work for you.
Download the latest version of Satori. (Click "satori.zip" under the assets section there.)
Inside the unzipped folder, select and copy satori.dll.
While the ghost in question is closed, paste the new satori.dll file into its ghost/master/ folder, overwriting the old one. (You can rename the old one before this if you want to keep a backup copy just in case.)
Boot the ghost and see if it worked.
This procedure fixes most issues with mojibake, although of course, it only applies to ghosts written in Satori. (That being said, Satori is an extremely popular choice for Japanese-speaking ghosts due to its ease of writing, so most ghosts you encounter are likely to use it.)
For other SHIORI, or issues not fixed by the above, you may need to adjust the charset.
For that, you can right click the ghost and navigate to Options>Set default charset.
The charset window itself looks like this:
For most ghosts, you'll only need to change the SHIORI option. For ghosts that have a makoto.dll file, you may also need to change the MAKOTO option. (For curious devs: MAKOTO is, to my knowledge, a shell-side predecessor to OnTranslate. It can still be used today, but it's very rare since OnTranslate covers most of what MAKOTO would do!)
The last two options are for such old ghosts that I'm actually not even sure what circumstances they'd be used in. Unless you are using ghosts from the very earliest days of ukagaka (perhaps before having different characters as separate ghosts had even been invented) you probably don't need to touch those two.
Most English-speaking ghosts are encoded in UTF-8, and many Japanese-speaking ghosts are encoded in Shift-JIS. There are exceptions of course, but those are the two encodings I would try to see if they make a difference.
It may be worth opening the ghost's descript.txt to see what it states the charset to be (this will usually be listed near the top of the file, like charset,Shift_JIS ). Try to match what's written there, especially if it's not Shift-JIS or UTF-8.
You can also try opening the ghost's dictionary files in a source code editor like Notepad++, and see what it says the character encoding is. (Usually the files you're looking for are in ghost/master/ and have "dic" or "dict" in the name or extension.) Notepad++ has a display in the bottom right corner of the window that shows the encoding as well as some other information, as you can see here.
Whatever encoding is shown there, try that one, especially if it's not Shift-JIS or UTF-8.
Hopefully one of those methods will work for you! If neither of those help, write back with some more details of what you've tried and what the situation looks like (as well as what SHIORI the ghost uses, if you can), and we'll try to help some more.
