Two irritating glitches impacting online league

[Corsairs]

I adore OOTP, and normally I like spending time on these forums reading posts and helping out where I can. For the last couple of months, though, I've been absolutely swamped with technical issues that have sapped my time and made running the PEBA and the LRS difficult. I'm making a push to get over the hump with these tech problems so that I can return to active duty here on the forums. Maybe somebody can help out with two of the smaller but more irritating issues I'm dealing with...

NOTE: For the record, until a week ago I was working off of a very old computer running Windows XP SP2. Last week I upgraded to a brand new system that's running Win 7 64-bit Edition. The problems have carried over to the new system. In both cases, the latest version of OOTP X is being run.

ISSUE #1: This is related to FaceGen picture generation. After each sim that I run, I go to Game Options --> Player & Picture Options and click the "Update / Generate Player Pictures" button. Used to be that whenever I did this it would generate a handful of new pictures. For awhile now I've noticed that it seems like the game is generating a lot of pictures when I do this.

Well, I've finally figured out why: Every time I press the "Update / Generate Player Pictures" button, OOTP is updating pictures for every retired player.

On the Player & Picture Options screen, I've tried changing the "Create Player Pictures" and "Update / Generate Player Pictures" options, but to no effect. It's probably worth mentioning that I am using Bobble's latest Facial Hair Mod for OOTP X.

Right now this is an irritation. In time it's going to become more than that. The PEBA is a big baseball universe and every season we're adding progressively more retired players. Already this is causing a great deal of league file update bloat; I shudder to think what it's going to do a few seasons down the line.

ISSUE #2: After every sim, I am discovering that some of the text files in the sub-directories of "..\news\txt" have had "garbage characters" inserted where there previously was a letter with a diacritic. For example, we have a sub-league called the Liga Dominicana de Béisbol Invernal. Note the accent mark over the "e" in "Béisbol".

After a sim, it's possible that an appearance of that accented "e" will not show up properly in a random text file. Instead of showing up as "é", it will instead show up as "é". Anytime this error occurs, the diacritic is replaced by a two-character "garbage entry", and always the first character of the garbage entry is "Ã".

What I've been doing to combat this is to use Notepad++ to find and replace these garbage entries with the proper diacritic. This is very tedious, obviously. I'd like to figure out what is causing the problem in the first place. It seems to be an encoding error of some kind. Am I right to say that OOTP text files are supposed to be saved in ANSI format rather than UTF-8?

I know these are rather esoteric issues. Probably there won't be much anyone can do here, but they've become big enough irritations that I'm ready to reach out and see if someone can point me in the right direction. It would mean a load off of mind, as well as a return to action on these forums!