Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: CaptainX on December 22, 2007, 02:40:11 pm
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Greetings all.
Can anyone provide some insight as to why, no matter what build I use, that my ship type limit is exactly 59?
I downloaded and installed the WC Saga build in order to use various WC ships to create a campaign. I have been adding these ships as per the usual method.
But for some reason, it will not let me add more than a total of 59 ships. I tried it with the WC Saga build, the Inferno build, and another build that was given to me a little while back that simply has the letters XTL in the name. (I don't know exactly what this build is).
None of these builds will allow me to add more than a full total of 59 ships, including all ships in the main ships.tbl file and any modified ones.
Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?
Thanks in advance for any help.
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You can't except if the code allow to have much more ship at the same time. The only solution I see, is to make a wing with several back up.
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Total number of ship classes that can exists is 130 for standard builds and 250 for inferno builds.
Remember that you need to use separate (and preferably newly created) pilot for separate builds (at least standard vs inferno).
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Total number of ship classes that can exists is 130 for standard builds and 250 for inferno builds.
That's where the problem is... no matter what build I use, I cannot have more than 59 ship classes. Any more than that and the list cuts them off.
I tried creating a brand new pilot and the same issue occurs.
You can't except if the code allow to have much more ship at the same time. The only solution I see, is to make a wing with several back up.
I'm referring to ship classes, not the number of ships in any specific mission.
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What kind error do you receive? Or what kind of problems do you encounter?
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I do not recieve any errors.
When I open FRED to create a mission and select the ship list to place a ship, there are exactly 59 ship types in the list. Adding another ship with all of its files (model, maps, table, etc) causes one of the ones on the list to be bumped off and the newly added ship replaces it.
FRED will not allow me to add more than a total of 59 ship types (57 is you exclude the Jump Point and Waypoint types).
At this time, I am using the Inferno build of both FRED and the main exe.
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Are you using FRED 2 Open ? or FRED 2 from the retail ?
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I am using the FRED2 Open Inferno build... I have also tried the regular SCP open build and another build that I haven't seen before. Same problem with all 3.
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Ok... Check which mods you have in use and then upload (or post as attachment) the ships.tbl somewhere so that we could have a look at it.
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Replace the 59th ship and see what changes.
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I removed the 59th ship and put another one in its place. The one I added now shows up as the 59th ship. If I leave that ship in there and then add the old one back in, it does not show up on the list at all. I then removed the new ship, and the old one then appeared on the list as the 59th ship.
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What happens if you place a ship on the map then go into the ship editor and try to change it? Do the rest of the ships show up then?
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Nope, only the same 59 show up.
That's what made me realize it had to be a ship type limit problem.
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What happens if you scroll down?
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Thats what I was thinking but the selection list in the ships editor and on the toolbar don't cut off at the same place. Well at least not that I've seen.
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Both the ship editor and the ship list cut off at the same place on my computer.
Scrolling down does nothing.
Is it possible the the ship type limit can be changed with a file other than the main exe?
Or can something be taking up the slots normally reserved for ship types?
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Does it work with the retail FS2 tables?
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I haven't tried it with those... this is the WC Saga download, the weapons and graphics tables are vital to the models I am using. It would fail immediately if I were to send them over to standard FS2.
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What happens if you copy the fred2_open from your fs2 directory to your WCS directory and run it?
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It works perfectly, but the ship type limit is still messed up.
That's what makes me think that it might be something else other than the exe that's causing this.
I've used both the main game exe and the FRED exe from several different builds, all with the same results.
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The source files might be the problem.
Try scanning the ships.tbl for ";". This will cause the shiplist to malfunction and several bad, bad things to happen if you put a semicolon in the wrong place. If you find any semicolons where they shouldn't be, remove them. I've gotten my list cut off before because I had a semicolon in the description of my ships. Alternatively, try running a debug FRED build and seeing what it says when it loads ships.tbl.
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Okay, doing that now. Will update shortly.
UPDATE: I get several errors when running FRED debug mode, but they are all related to missing weapons - one of the ships I converted over hasn't had its weapons changed to WC weapons yet.
What are appropriate places to find ";" in the ships.tbl file? There are several in there, and they are used in a coupla different contexts.
I see everal comment lines which are proceeded by either one or two semicolons, like this:
; comment
;; comment
I also see a coupla lines that look like this:
; $ND: 42 42 244
Any insights?
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Update above ^^^
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Comments should be commented out by:
; This is a comment
Or
;; This is also a comment, but the second semicolon makes no difference
The ND is short for No Dim, which was FS2's origional hackish support of lights. Basically, it's an RGB value of what color to not dim as the ships were rendered, so that they would glow in the darkness. These are left out for good reason, as we now have magical glow maps.
The weapons problems probably aren't the problem. And where did you get your ships table? All I can suggest is a thorough examination of each entry, or perhaps the deletion of all description fields. :V: Actually had this problem too- with one of their missions, they accidentally put a semicolon in the briefing stage, and didn't realize the semicolon was the problem, so they just ended up deleting it. In all honesty, that's kind of difficult given your lack of expertise with the ships.tbl.
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Does anyone want to take a look at the ships.tbl file and see what they can find? It's the WCS version of it and only has about 30 ships in it.
I desperately need to fix this problem.
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It would be somewhat easier to check the ships.tbl file if there was one to be checked...
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I notice you don't mention running the debug builds which should be your first port of call for something this strange (Debug builds have much better error reporting).
Check the fs2_open.log you'll find in your data folder too.
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It would be somewhat easier to check the ships.tbl file if there was one to be checked...
I didn't figure it was necessary to post it until someone actually wanted to look at it. I've attached it now.
I notice you don't mention running the debug builds which should be your first port of call for something this strange (Debug builds have much better error reporting).
When I ran the FRED2 debug builds, the only errors I received were ones I was expecting - weapons errors from ships that have not had their weapons changed from FS2 weps to WC weps.
[attachment deleted by admin]
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Ummmmm. You don't have 59 classes on that table as far as I can see.
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Yes I know. I have 32 ships that have their own separate tbm files.
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What happens if you stick together two of the tbm files? Does it now stick at 60?
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No luck.
The limit remains the same regardless of how many ship tbms I combine.
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Stick the lot together and post it. Let's see if any of us can replicate this.
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The whole thing? That's a LOT of files... the entire folder consists of 963 MB.
Do you want me to post EVERYTHING, or only certain files?
EDIT: Actually, if you guys already have WC Saga, then the total amount of files is about 350 MB uncompressed.
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Just the tables
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Roger that, they're attached.
[attachment deleted by admin]
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Hmmmm. I'm getting the same error you're getting but with all the errors in the debug output it's really hard to figure out where the cause is.
I recommend getting all the errors that the debug build complains about fixed. Check the logs too cause there are a lot of errors like this
At least one of the following tags was used on ship Amadeus Class, subsystem ÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌContainer01a:
+untargetable
+carry-no-damage
+use-multiple-guns
+fire-down-normals
Use of deprecated subsystem syntax. Please use the $Flags: field for subsystem flags.
Or this
WARNING: Animation trigger #0 on subsystem 'turret01a', for ship 'Caernaven Class', has a negative reverse_start value! Capping it at 0!
Once those are fixed it will be a lot easier to track down the actual cause.
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I'll check those when I get home at 3pm CST, I'm at work at the moment.
Were you using the main exe debug build or the FRED2 debug build? I remember running the FRED2 build but haven't tried the exe build yet.
The only errors that came up in FRED were related to the Archangel battleship, which I am converting over to WCS from FS2. I haven't had a chance to change all the weapons on it to WC weapons - they're all still FS2 weapons, which are obviously throwing up some errors.
When I get home, I'll check into each error and get to work on fixing them. If I find any I don't know how to fix, I'll post here.
Someone be sure to tell Scooby to be watching this thread, these are all his ships and tables, after all :p
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I was using a 3.6.10 build since that picks up a few extra problems that 3.6.9 doesn't.
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Karajorma,
I'm not getting any of the errors you described above. I get several errors, but they are all related to not finding the glow textures for weapons. Nothing like you have listed above.
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Hmmmm. I'm getting the same error you're getting but with all the errors in the debug output it's really hard to figure out where the cause is.
I recommend getting all the errors that the debug build complains about fixed. Check the logs too cause there are a lot of errors like this
At least one of the following tags was used on ship Amadeus Class, subsystem ÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌContainer01a:
+untargetable
+carry-no-damage
+use-multiple-guns
+fire-down-normals
Use of deprecated subsystem syntax. Please use the $Flags: field for subsystem flags.
Or this
WARNING: Animation trigger #0 on subsystem 'turret01a', for ship 'Caernaven Class', has a negative reverse_start value! Capping it at 0!
Once those are fixed it will be a lot easier to track down the actual cause.
Those are directly Saga related. I believe they were using an older build for the prologue release.
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Those are in the log not popup warnings.
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Okay, I just spent quite a bit of time removing each individual table from the tables folder and reopening FRED, to see if one of those tables was causing the ship limit problem.
No matter which table I removed, the limit remained constant. So... wouldn't that mean that none of the tables are the problem?
What else could cause a ship limit problem? Can someone intentionally limit the number of ship types using a command or a file or an entry of some sort?
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Unless it's the big table that's at fault rather than the modular ones it does seem that way. I'll take a look at this one later myself.
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Remove all my stuff and see if that makes a difference.
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If I remove everything of yours, I won't be able to tell if the problem still exists, since the only ships I have installed are yours.
Let me know if you guys come up with anything. I'll have to put my campaign plans on permanent hold until a solution is found.
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The problem is definitely the Ships.tbl you are using. Cut it up into modular tables and add them one at a time and you should be able to figure out which one is the cause. I'm having a problem with building 3.6.10 at the moment which means I can't figure out which ship is causing you trouble.
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Sorry it's been a few days since I posted here.
I haven't had a chance to try your suggestion above yet. I'll have to extract the entire core VP and then create all the new tables, which is quite a bit of work. I'll start working on it this evening.
I'll post here again when I have some results.
Happ New Year!
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Well guys, after trying everything I could think of, and all of your suggestions, nothing has worked.
I believe I have to officially declare this problem a lost cause.
I originally planned to create a campaign using the WC Saga stuff, but it looks like that's not going to happen. I thank you all for putting so much effort into solving the problem, but I guess there are just some problems out there that can't be overcome.
Back to the drawing board for another idea.