ModsConfig.xml

[Fargham]

So - a bit of a bug I encountered.

I have been beating my head against a wall trying to get ANY mod to work - but I kept getting a "Cannot find Byte Order Marker, Cannot Switch to Unicode" error when trying to load a server.  In single player the server doesn't load, but there isn't any nice console message why.

I went through all my mod files.
I uninstalled (completely) and reinstalled about 20 times.
I went through all the newest mod (beyond the core).  I couldn't figure out what the problem was.  All my xml files were UTF-8.  Then i realized the only file I didnt check was the one that came standard with the game.  ModsConfig.xml.  I open the file, and despite the opening tag telling me the file contents were UTF-16, Notepad++ was asserting that ModsConfig.xml was itself encoded using UTF-8 without BOM.   

So, a quick fix to change the UTF-16 to UTF-8 and convert the xml file in question to UTF-8 (with the BOM), and now my mod loads.

I don't know if its the launcher that changes this ModsConfig.xml file to UTF-8 without BOM, but regardless it breaks mods, so hopefully this can be changed in future?

[DLirry]

Firstly, thank you very much for your report!

This is a very nasty bug indeed. Totally didn't see it coming.
We will look into it and fix it as soon as possible!

[Hammish]

This 100% fixed my issue as well, so you have my great thanks.  Now I can continue work on my great labor.

Incidentally (not sure if this should go down to bugs/fixes or not, but... ) before I tried loading with BTC I tried just changing it to UTF-8 and saving with the proper encoding, then trying to launch a game with the stock files.  Server was still crashing on me.  Once I added in BTC everything seemed to take just fine.  It might have just been a weird bug on my end, or it might be that other files got changed improperly between 0.8.3 and 0.8.4 (the base .XML files in the mod are from 0.8.3, and currently there is a copy of all of them in the .MPK)

TL;DR, if I change modsconfig.xml by hand like Fargham mentioned, I can get the 0.8.3 data files to load just fine.  0.8.4 data files still crash the server runtime on my end.