[Steam Deck] Routes missing in the main loader and encoding issues (OpenBVE 1.9.1.1)

Hello there once again!

I've had a longer time without further developments in the world of BVE, which has two main reasons. The first one is because my desktop PC has got a serious power supply problem and therefore I couldn't use it since more than a month already - not sure how long it still takes, I haven't invested my free time in it recently.

The second one, though, is exactly why I now started this topic. Since September 2022 I have a Steam Deck, and since my desktop PC has the issues, the Deck has become my primary PC.

Most of the games and programs work great on the KDE Plasma Linux based Steam OS, or at least almost. The compatibility with OpenBVE 1.9.1.1 using Wine is... well, so-so. Many routes and trains work perfectly on the Deck, but some routes are simply missing from the game's main loader when I enter the Route folder. Personally, I think this might be a bug with the filename encodings, as the game doesn't seem to handle the special Hungarian characters like á, é, í, ó, ö, ú, ű as it should do.

I attach here some screenshots to show you what I'm talking about. If you look at the route selector windows, you can clearly see that no any route after "Gyorsitott szemely" and no folder after "Dunakeszi Metro" gets listed while there are lots of routes that start alphabetically higher than "G" or "D" in their first letter so something clearly doesn't seem to work there.

Could you dig into this a little bit? Why can these encoding issues appear and make the game not load the route list as it did right on my Windows 10 based desktop PC?

If this could get fixed, I could restart further BVE addon development, as currently this is the only thing that forces me to stop, because I cannot test my developments properly as long as this issue exists.

Thank you in advance, and have a great summer!

Marcell

Hi Everyone,

For me, it works fine, but my OS is Windows 11 22H2 Home, so it cannot be representative.
As you can see on this picture below, I created a folder (which name is: "ÁRVÍZTŰRŐ TÜKÖRFÚRÓGÉP árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép") to test Marcell's issue, and for me, it is not a problem.



I have already dug into this issue, but I could only identify, which file needed some modification...



Unfortunately, so far I haven't found the right places within this file where these changes are needed, I hope you know those, Chris.

@Marcell : How long have you had this text-encoding issue? Since September 2022 ? What was the oldest OpenBVE version you tried and this issue was already there?

Alternatively, I think the Routes and Trains would also appear, if the characters with accents were removed with a program or just manually.

I mean:

From >> To
------------
á >> a
é >> e
í >> i
ó >> o
ö >> o
ő >> o
ú >> u
ü >> u
ű >> u
Á >> A
É >> E
Í >> I
Ó >> O
Ö >> O
Ő >> O
Ú >> U
Ü >> U
Ű >> U

Best Regards,
Andras

Scratches head....

The code in the linked image above wouldn't do anything for stuff completely missing from the main menu- All it really does is set the encoding for a few known odd cases where its misdetected, so that the description / station names are readable.

I can't immediately reproduce this, which suggests that it's most likely something funny- Storage filesystem related maybe? Excessive number of subdirectories? Id also probably try a different DE if possible; Mono Winforms is somewhat of an undersupported mess on Linux these days.....
You could also try browsing via the Z drive in Wine (this should be your Linux root) to see if they aren't in the folder you expect.
Running via WINE also adds another translation layer- See if it works natively.

TBQH, non ANSI characters in filenames have never been an especially good idea, and I'd encourage developers to avoid where possible.

SteamDeck's locale is special and contains only English and my Japanese is missing.
And while KDE Plasma is supposed to use pacman to populate the locales, SteamDeck resets the system folders after every update.
Therefore, it is a troublesome system that you have to re-enter the locale each time.
I suspect this is affecting it.
For example, this kind of work is necessary to localize to Japanese.
https://gist.github.com/XargonWan/cc660daf92c224b7241cbf5a2bf12c47
However, as I just said, I think this will be deleted with each update.
Packages also use flatpak instead of pacman.
For this reason, OpenBVE cannot be started directly because mono cannot be installed with pacman.
To start it, you need to register with lutris or Steam launcher and run it with proton.
It is probably intended to prevent users who do not know Linux from destroying the system, but for those of us who know Linux, it is very troublesome.

Using openBVE Windows installer in Lutris and moving the folders to the new location finally solved the issue. Seems like Wine had this encoding problem that caused the bug above. Thank you for the recommendation, Midnight Express Ginga81!