Very serious & stubborn problem with loading of Sceneryobjects & Splines with special characters (Unicode, etc)

Hey there,

First - the relevant system information. This applies to all time periods described in this post.

- OMSI 2 Steam Edition, with 4GB Patch installed.

- OS: Windows 10 Professional 1809 17763.1098 x64 en_GB

- OS Language & Locale: British English (UK):

So in the summer of 2018 I had a problem where tiles on most maps would simply fail to load, and I would be left with a blue sky, even though MapTools and BlueSky showed all dependencies as present. Pretty much all maps. When that happened, I was given an entry in the logfile: in file maps\<map>\tile.map there was an error in line xxxx. Thus I was able to pinpoint the problem to Sceneryobjects\Addon_gCW\ampel_rot_grun.sco. Even though this file was present and the meshes & textures too, it would cause an error with OMSI. Looking into the folder I noticed a total carnage of files.

I have no idea how they came to my PC, why they were there, or which maps used them / came bundled with them. The possibility of file corruption is ruled out because my drive was in pristine health (CrystalDiskInfo, etc) and the contents of each file were intact.

It seems that the presence of these files with these filenames broke OMSI alone, and that was all it took. I moved the folder out of my OMSI 2 installation, re-installed the stock addon_gcW and all was well.

-------

However last night the issue returned, out of nowhere, in a new form:

• Happens on every single European map now without fail. Some or all tiles fail to load.
• No matter what I try (enable "Show errors" in OMSI 2 settings, using the launch argument -logall), when a map tile fails to load, there is nothing in the logfile. PERIOD. Here is an example from when I loaded a map that failed to load a single tile at all: https://pastebin.com/raw/TcAtBsu3

The maps, in every instance, showed no missing objects, splines, humans, AI, textures etc etc in MapTools and BlueSky. There were no hidden blank characters in the output box. There was nothing missing according to it.

I pasted the list of objects into Notepad++ and used regex to weed out special characters. I explored the folders and lo and behold, they have the same garbage files present as the ampel_rot_grun area above.

However, the main differences are:

• These files were always present since 2018. The issue randomly started at some point. The maps worked just fine last year.
• I have not run Windows Updates, changed my language, or even touched my OMSI 2 installation since 2020 or so. I am just playing what I already have for now. Most of my PC is unchanged since then.

So, I decided that (even though this shouldn't be necessary as it worked fine before) to try some things to fix the issues.

I tried:

• Enabling the "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8"... option in the locale settings window above. All this did was make every single unicode character display as an empty character on my PC. This exposed erroneous sceneryobjects in the OMSI log, but it was no longer loading objects with ß that it was loading perfectly fine before. So it just created more errors.
• Using LocaleEmu to emulate German Locale for OMSI 2. I also tried Polish, Russian... it did nothing.
• Installing German, Polish, Russian language packs in Windows. Did nothing.
• Manually replacing all objects and splines for the map that had special characters with copies without special characters. This only partially worked as some o3d filenames still had special characters, and even when I fixed that, the issue was STILL happening. Somehow, even though all filenames were normal ASCII now, which fixed my issue before, those garbled characters being present was still screwing with OMSI.
• Checked that my drive is still in pristine health (it is)
• Where maps required DLCs, they were installed and showing as activated in OMSI.
• Verifying game cache for OMSI 2 and all required DLC via Steam.

This issue seems to be exactly what another user was experiencing here: RE: Ahlheim - Laurenzbach but you see, my OMSI install is much larger. It worked before. I would really appreciate if there was a better way than having to reinstall so many Sceneryobjects, etc.

My problems and questions:

• Why on earth is this suddenly messing with my OMSI now. It never did before. I made zero changes to my entire PC or OMSI since it worked, its like it broke overnight.
• How do I even start weeding out all the directories filled with files with those garbage characters in their filenames? I could manually do it for this, but my OMSI install is giant and has several several maps. It would mean every time I need to play I need to spend hours fixing the maps and object folders. Is there a proper fix for this?

I am totally lost. I tried all obvious solutions to fix this, even removing all references to special characters from a map, and it didn't work. Meanwhile, just a year ago everything was working fine with all this "garbage" present. Why does OMSI care now?

All help and ideas are widely appreciated. Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: So it seems this is different to the ampel_rot_grun problem. All I did was re-extract and overwrite the two DavidM folders from Sceneryobjects from Ahlheim - Laurenzbach Updated (not deleting the folders already there) and it fixed Ahlheim Laurenzbach Updated map. This is the only map I tested so far. Still, I feel this issue remains open because its like it clicked overnight. Nothing changed on my disks yet this morning I have to reinstall the map to make it work. Also, god knows how many other maps are broken right now with this issue. I spotted all the unicode garbage in several other folders while trying to fix this issue.