Okay to change FALLOUT.ini?

[Deleted31294585User]

So I'm editing the Fallout.ini, FalloutPrefs.ini and Fallout_default.ini and basically I have a problem. (I already marked off the .ini setting, 'read only'.)

 

So I'm editing it to handle threads more efficiently, for better stability. Thing is, whenever I tried to save the settings, it said "This .ini file is encoded in ANSI format and has Unicode lines. To save the Unicode lines, you need to change encoding."

 

So I changed all the .ini file's encoding as Unicode, because it was set to ANSI as default, and apparently it had Unicode encoding already.

 

After changing the ini's to Unicode encoding, I could successfully save with no errors.

 

So my question is, is it okay for me to change the encoding on the Fallout.ini, FalloutPrefs.ini and Fallout_default.ini to Unicode encoding from ANSI? I'm pretty sure it's much better if I do, but I'd just like confirmation.

 

Thanks :)

[dubiousintent]

Short answer: yes.

 

It's more a function of the language setting of your system. Given the game provides multinational language support, it has to be able to read a unicode encoded file. This link has a simple explanation of the difference between "character set" (i.e. ASCII) and "encoding" (i.e. ANSI or Unicode among others).

 

-Dubious-

[Deleted31294585User]

Short answer: yes.

 

It's more a function of the language setting of your system. Given the game provides multinational language support, it has to be able to read a unicode encoded file. This link has a simple explanation of the difference between "character set" (i.e. ASCII) and "encoding" (i.e. ANSI or Unicode among others).

 

-Dubious-

 

Thank you so much for your answer. Any idea why it said that the .ini files had Unicode formatting?

[dubiousintent]

This is a very simplified explanation. See this article for an idea of how complicated it can get for old standards like Notepad.

 

Certain "character sets" can only be represented in Unicode. When the file is encoded, it puts a single "byte order mark" at the very beginning that tells the Operating System which encoding format is being used. Until Unicode came along, ANSI file encoding had no such identifying byte, so the encoding defaulted to that of the system (usually the ANSI "locale"). Many older text editors (i.e. Notepad) default to saving as ANSI encoding without the encoding byte, even though they may permit characters above the 127 of the ACSII character set. (So called "Alt characters" because they were created by entering the character code using the "Alt" key combined with the 3-digit numbers of the character code from the keypad.) These days the wide-spread use of other character sets for the Internet forces the OS to be stricter about encoding, so when a file has such characters without the encoding byte, it complains so you are aware something is not quite as it should be. Then what you see depends upon the fonts you have available and how closely they can represent the character set in use. In addition, some older editors can mistake all lower-case strings as Unicode characters in error.

 

Actually your question was slightly reversed from your original error message. The file contained Unicode characters, but lacked the encoding byte, and so was treated as ANSI. Sort of a "which was first, the chicken or the egg" situation.

 

-Dubious-

Edited July 9, 2016 by dubiousintent