Character encoding for special characters

[DaveReed]

I ran into a little problem.

In Germany we use very often ö, ä and ü in usernames, so the user-path of windows contains these characters, too.
Your application does not support these characters. "Jürgen" is modified to "JÄ%rgen" and the application is unable to start.

Can you please add UTF-8 support to your application to fix this issue?

[Baertram]

What application do you talk about please?

[Sharlikran]

That's not something can be done because it doesn't have anything to do specifically with ESO. Only use standard ASCII A-Z for usernames. This is a common issue even with single player games like Skyrim or Fallout 4.

[DaveReed]

Originally Posted by Baertram What application do you talk about please?

I'm talking about the Minion - Premier AddOn Management and already found a few posts there containing exact the same problem, but without solution.

Posted in one of them, too
https://www.esoui.com/forums/showthr...9815#post49815

[DaveReed]

Originally Posted by Sharlikran That's not something can be done because it doesn't have anything to do specifically with ESO. Only use standard ASCII A-Z for usernames. This is a common issue even with single player games like Skyrim or Fallout 4.

I'm talking about usernames being used to create the windows installation.
ESO got no problems with that, the problem here is the coding of the Minion AddOn Management, which I know found the correct forum for.

[Baertram]

Originally Posted by DaveReed I'm talking about the Minion - Premier AddOn Management and already found a few posts there containing exact the same problem, but without solution. Posted in one of them, too https://www.esoui.com/forums/showthr...9815#post49815

Moved to Minion forum.

Btw. Solution was provided in about every thread that describes the same problem AND in the stickyt Minion troubleshooting guide point 3. which asks you to read before posting new threads:
[!!! Troubleshooting guide for Minion - Read before post !!!]

[DaveReed]

Originally Posted by Baertram Moved to Minion forum. Btw. Solution was provided in about every thread that describes the same problem AND in the stickyt Minion troubleshooting guide point 3. which asks you to read before posting new threads: [!!! Troubleshooting guide for Minion - Read before post !!!]

So your solution to the problem is to force every user to create ea new windows installation or create a new user instead of just simply add UTF-8 support to the application so everyone around the globe can use the application without problems?

[wookiefriseur]

That's strange, because Minion already starts with UTF-8:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Minion\app\Minion.cfg:

[JVMOptions]
-Xmx128m
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

If it was just a problem with CP-1252 and UTF-8, it should output question marks instead of replacing "ü" with "Ä%".


I have some ideas that do not involve renaming your user. But they are all ugly. Let's try the easy one first:

1. uninstall minion (check "Delete config files")
2. start powershell as admin
3. run following command to create a symbolic link
   • New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Target "C:\Users\Jürgen" -Path "C:\Users\" -Name "Juergen"
   • this creates a link to your user directory next to it
   • to minion it looks like the real user directory
4. install Minion, but replace the "ü" in the suggested installation path with "ue"
   • Should result in: "C:\Users\Juergen\AppData\Local\Minion"
5. run Minion
6. manually pick the AddOn path from the Symlink instead of your real directory
   • should be something like: "C:\Users\Juergen\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live\AddOns"
7. wait a while until Minion has loaded your AddOns
   • you may have to restart Minion, if it doesn't do anything for 10 minutes
   • always use the Symlink path if you have to point it to the AddOn folder again

This assumes that you have a standard Documents folder path and did not change your system much.


What to watch out for:

1. do NOT create a new user named "Juergen"
2. if you rename "Jürgen" in the future, the symlink will point to nothing
3. Minion might get the user directory in other ways internally which might use the "Jürgen" path again, so if it breaks for certain actions (like backups) it might be because of that
4. once Minion 4 is released it might require a different solution or might not have this problem at all

[Baertram]

Originally Posted by DaveReed So your solution to the problem is to force every user to create ea new windows installation or create a new user instead of just simply add UTF-8 support to the application so everyone around the globe can use the application without problems?

My solution for you Jürgen, as I'm not involved into Minion development at all and only provide you a workaround, is that workaround to rename or copy the user to "Juergen", yes.
And noone ever said you need to install windows new? You just need to rename or create a new user in your windows which is kind of really easy doable.


If that is nothing you want to do you need to currently live with the problem of Minion 3 not supporting any characters like that,
sadly but that's how it curently is.
Or you try Wookie's ideas.
Or you wait for Minion 4 to get released any day.