[brinlong]

This is one I can't explain at all. Starting a new mission, I decided to do the briefing first, so I wouldn't have to worry about lining up the camera later. I create some throw away ships and some icons off them to move around. So far, so good. The moment I drag one of them around the XZ plane, it suddenly flies off the screen. No problem, I just recreate the ship icon, and the same thing happens. I try moving some of the other ship icons, and the don't fly away like the first ones. They just vanish, only leaving a little green box that says briefing icon, with no blue shade image. I try toggling my viewing options but nothing happens. I reread the FRED FAQS and tutorials, and I can't find anything at all like this. I can't find the rest of the icons either, and this is starting to weird me out. I've already set up a couple of briefings before this, and nothing like this has happened, and I haven't drastically changed any of the settings from when I first started.

[karajorma]

I'm assuming you're using FRED2 Open? More specifically the one that came with 3.6.5?

IF so try using a newer build. This one for instance

[DarthWang]

I can never see the actual icons, I just use the 'briefing icon' text and memorize which is which, then position them accordingly.

[brinlong]

Thanks, the newer build works perfectly. But that is still so odd, because the 3.6.5 build was working perfectly until I used it the third or fourth time

[brinlong]

I've run into a problem with the latest build. After putting enough of a mission together, I tried opening it to test it out, and got this error table:

Error: Follow the Leader.fs2(30):
Error: Required token = [#Plot Info], found [#Command Briefing] .

File:E:\Languages\Visual Studio Projects\Visual C++\fs2_open\code\Parse\PARSELO.CPP
Line: 531
[This filename points to the location of a file on the computer that built this executable]

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------

Unless I'm mistaken, its saying theres a problem with the command briefing, but I'm not using one. Any ideas?

[karajorma]

You've had the supreme bad luck of having a mission corrupt itself on your first attempt. Mission corruption like this is quite rare and not too hard to fix if you know what you're doing. You can open this mission and another working mission in notepad and compare the two to figure out what's wrong.

A simpler alternative is to try looking for a file called Follow The Leader.bak or opening the backup.00x files that Freespace saves in the missions folder. Both of these will open in FRED and are ways to recover an uncorrupted mission as long as you haven't made too many changes since you last saved.

If both of those fail to resolve the problem post the mission here and I'll fix it for you if I can.

[brinlong]

I guess I'm just getting all the best cards on the first draw.  The Command Briefing tag got ahead of the Plot Lines tag. Once I moved the Command Briefing where it needed to go, it worked fine. Speaking of, why wouldn't the bug dectector in FRED pick something like this up. It would seem like one of those things that could be corrected automatically.

[karajorma]

The corruption only occurs when the mission is written to disk. If you'd had the mission open and simply saved it again it probably would have worked.

You do seem to have been very unlucky to have this happen on your first ever mission. I've only had it happen to me once in the last 2 years and I've only fixed 3-4 other people's missions previously.

[brinlong]

Could there be a problem with the latest build of FRED? The same problem is happening every time I save the file.

[karajorma]

Hmmmm. Sounds like a bug in FRED. I have the same version and assume the mission is the FA one you posted earlier so I'll take a look at it a bit later and see if I can reproduce the bug myself.