[LE] Creation Kit & SSEEdit Encoding

[Shamyase]

Hi there,

 

Last year I've been working on french translations for some Skyrim Vanilla mods.
I bought SSE recently, so I kinda came back into modding, but I'm having issues with the new tools.

The following is tested with Skyrim.esm only.

 

First, the new CK won't display correctly characters with an accent. For instance, "é" shall be replaced by "é", "ê" by "ê", etc. I didn't have this issue on the Skyrim Vanilla CK. And before anyone asks, yup, I did add this line into the CreationKit.ini : sLanguage=FRENCH.

Second, here are my logs when using SSEEdit 4.0.1 :

"Using language: french
Using general string encoding: 1252 (ANSI - latin I)
Using translatable string encoding: 65001 (UTF- :cool:
Using VMAD string encoding: 65001 (UTF- :cool:

[00:00] Background Loader: [skyrim_french.DLSTRINGS] Using encoding (from language): 65001 (UTF- :cool: with fallback (from languange) to: 1252 (ANSI - latin I)
[00:00] Background Loader: [skyrim_french.ILSTRINGS] Using encoding (from language): 65001 (UTF- :cool: with fallback (from languange) to: 1252 (ANSI - latin I)
[00:00] Background Loader: [skyrim_french.STRINGS] Using encoding (from language): 65001 (UTF- :cool: with fallback (from languange) to: 1252 (ANSI - latin I)

[and the same goes for DLC's french strings]

No error here, but I'm not sure on the meaning of these last lines. Is SSEEdit going to use 1252 encoding instead of UTF-8 ? Or the opposite ?
When searching for some documentation : "UTF8 encoding for localized strings needs a fallback mechanism if strings are not valid UTF8".
At this point, I don't know anymore if my default french strings are using UTF-8, or 1252 (ANSI).

 

Now, let's say I'm modifying a mod, using the CK.

First, I write a character with an accent, then I save the .esp and I open it again with the CK ; the character appears correctly.
But if I open this very same .esp with SSEEdit, I get an error : "Can't read string: [EEncodingError] No mapping for the Unicode character exists in the target multi-byte code page". And the string containing this character is replaced by a bunch of numbers and letters.
Here is the only "doc" I could find about it.
The fix proposed by the author of SSEEdit consists in re-writing everything in SSEEdit. But then again, I would have weird characters displayed in the CK.

SSEEdit seems to work just fine as long as I don't write characters with accent in the CK. The CK doesn't seem to use the correct encoding when reading a mod. Or maybe these issues are coming from the .strings files ?

NB : In game, characters with accent are displayed just fine, may it be encoded with the CK or with SSEEdit. The real problem appears when I have to modify a lot of texts in the CK, SSEEdit becomes unmanageable.
EDIT : SSEEdit and CK are both launched from MO2.

Any help is very welcome,
Have a good day/night everyone. :smile:


************ ANSWER *************

I finally found the answer after some more researches. "FO4 and SSE CKs do not support utf-8."

Only strings in english are using ANSI encoding, any other language uses utf-8, so the SSE CKs can only read english characters (Vanilla CKs was able to read both, that's why I had no issue). There doesn't seem to be any setting to change that. I hope Bethesda will update their CK to make it able to manage utf-8.
Hope this could help.

Edited March 4, 2019 by Shamyase