[Selectah]

Greetings, o' most esteemed fellow FS'ians,

This issue has most probably been dealt w/ in the forum, but I can't find any reference to it, so here goes: how's about that Player Entry Bug? What are the reasons for it, really? The PEB, as you may be aware, is the annoying mission entry time of 2:18 (or something) that happens because of... because of... Yeah, what are the reasons for it, really? Too many ships in ships.tbl? Too many VP files in the FS2 dir? Oh, forgot to tell ya, I have Vanilla FS2 plus the FreeSpace Port (by GalEmp/Goober) installed. That's it. No other mods at all. Still, the PEB comes up time and again. I've deleted all pilots and re-entered a new one, but to no avail. What's a girl to do?

-Selectah

EDIT: The entry time is 2:18. Sorry about that. Ooooh, I love this edit button...

[karajorma]

When the mission starts the clock says it's 2 minutes into the mission. Other weird things have also happened.

This is the infamous player entry delay error. It is caused by having too many ships in the ships.tbl You can't really do anything about it except reduce the number of ships in your table. Once you've trimmed down the number of ships in the table you can salvage your mission by opening it up in notepad. Look for a line that says "+Player Entry Delay:" The number afterwards probably says something like ~120 Change that number to 2.0000 (everyone says 0 but when I looked at working missions of mine the number there was 2) and your mission should work.

Now the odd thing is that the FS1Port should work perfectly well with retail and not cause this bug. You could try extracting the table to Freespace2\Data\Tables to make absolutely certain nothing is overriding it. If that doesn't solve the problem try editing the table to remove FS2 only ships like the Sathanas, hecate, Diemos etc

[Selectah]

Thank you for the reply, Karajorma.

Yeah, I do find it kinda odd, myself. Seemingly FRED2 does a lot of weird (and uncalled for) entries in the mission files, such as the "+Player Entry Delay 138.04552" thing. It looks a bit like the HLP post count. I removed the entries from the mission files w/ Notepad++ and I deleted all references to existing pilots, but the problem persists. I am aware of yer trustworthy FAQ, Karajorma, I just thought there might be something else causing havoc, something that the community is aware of, but not listed in yer FAQ. 'Twas just a thought. I have the ships.tbl extracted to the appropriate folder, but that's just the same table file as the one found in fsport.vp, with the only exception of an added "dont collide invisible" to capital ships. Oddly, this doesn't seem to work, either.

Compassionately,
-Selectah

[Goober5000]

You could manually add the "Player entry delay" line and set it to 2 or whatever.  That'd fix it.

The reason the delay is all manner of strange values is because it's never initialized.  So, force it to be initialized.

[karajorma]

Actually do a search for *.tbl and see what turns up. There are some places that are even higher priority than Freespace2\Data\Tables although I couldn't tell you where exactly without checking.

[Selectah]

Found it, btw. 'Twas merely a leftover ships.tbl in a VP that I thought I'd deemed finished. Seemingly, vanilla doesn't like 200+ ship entries. I always thought that it'd be the size of the tbl file. Manifestly, it isn't. Anyways, it was merely a product of my own sloppiness. Sorry.

[karajorma]

> 380k in FS2 Retail causes crashes. >130 ships gives you this problem.

Most people usually see the crash first.