KSP cannot load contents of folders that contain the "#" symbol in Win

[Holyvision]

I figured this out with the help of Red5, Cactus, and others in Kiwi chat. I don't know that I would of figured this out otherwise.

I went to install a second instance of KSP on my system after the first. Using only the mods KAS and KW Rocketry (these are the same two mods that are used in the first game install). Whenever I would launch a ship in the second game, I would get error messages telling me that the mod's sound files could not be loaded; this was also reflected in the gameplay (no mod sounds). I never got a crash from this, but had the sound issues. I never had these issues -- with the exact same mods -- on my first game install. All mods are good downloads and good installs. I even tried moving an exact copy of the first (working) install's GameData folder into the second (not working) KSP folder, and got same issues.

Needed information: My first game was installed in C:/KSP. I tried to install my secondary install in C:/KSP/KSP install #2, C:/games/KSP install #2, and several other places. No matter where I installed the second game, I was always getting the sound issues that I was NOT getting in my first install.

After digging through the output_log, I found this line:

"Audio load error: Couldn't open file C:\KSP\KSP INSTALL "

Every time the game tried to load a sound file after this error, it would post:

"Filename: C:/BuildAgent/work/d63dfc6385190b60/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp"

However, the key thing to notice here is that the game's installed folder was actually named "KSP INSTALL #2".

I went and removed the "#" from the folder name, changing it to only "KSP install 2", and the game now runs without any sound errors as it should.

So, it would seem that for whatever reason KSP doesn't like a directory that includes a "#" in its name.

I know this is a tiny minute little thing, and I don't even know that this is something that you could consider a bug, but it took me a while to figure out, and wasn't something I would have considered being the issue; especially because windows allows "#" in a directory name without problem.

Hopefully this can save someone else that may have this issue some time and aggravation!

Thank you Squad for all you do!

--Holy

::EDIT::

If a moderator sees this and knows of a more appropriate place for a bug report to go, please feel free to move it there. Sorry if this is the wrong spot!

Edited December 10, 2014 by Holyvision

[vexx32]

Moved to the Support/Bugs section.

I don't know why this would occur, but from the symptoms, it may be more of an inherent Unity bug than a KSP-specific one. It might be worth reporting it on the Unity forums, too.

[longbyte1]

This is actually a Unity issue (Unity doesn't play well with Unicode special characters in file paths for some reason).

[vexx32]

I don't know if a hash (#) counts as a Unicode character specifically, I mean it is part of the standard ASCII encoding.