[diamondgeezer]

OK, since no one has posted a crashy mission problem in a good day or so, here's a slightly odd'n for you:

I was just double checking that a mission I made a couple of months ago was still working, before I put it in a campaign. As far as I could remember it worked perfectly, but when I tried it today it had all gone pear-shaped... There are no errors given in FRED2, and it loads to the briefing screen just fine. However, when I hit 'commit', it just crashes to desktop. No error boxes, nothing.

I know this isn't exactly much to go on, but does this scenario seem familiar to anyone? And if it is FUBAR, any tips about what and what not to cut n' paste to a new mission in Notepad would be appreciated...

[CP5670]

Yeah, I get this every now and then, but there are so many causes for this that it is difficult to start debugging from that end. Instead, try using your last save of the mission (the bak file) and see if that works, and then go step by step to the current version until you narrow down the problem. Or if it you have modified the tables since then, try to remember what changes you made and set things as they used to be before.

[Silver_Scythe]

Ahhhh the PROBLEM
The Answere to the PROBLEM is simple. Reinstall freespace and keep your data files. It worked for me.

[diamondgeezer]

Unfortuantely, the backup missions and BAKs are also up the creek... ho hum. Looks like it's time for some random cutting and pasting of the BAKs...

BTW Scythe mate, the method you propose seems a little haphazard, and I fail to grasp its significance... still, thanks for trying. For the record, this is the first time I attempted this mission since formatting the entire HD about a week ago. Kept all my data of course... I guess FS2 just doesn't like me

[Vasudan Admiral]

hmm, are you using modded ships in the mission? if so, are any docked/docking/undocking at the very start of the mission? if so again, the problem *may* be the path the dockpoint uses. it happened to me quite recently. as soon as any ship tries to follow the path, fs crashes. my problem was that i'd assigned a path that didn't exist to the dockpoint. of course, it could be something else entirely, but anyway...

[diamondgeezer]

No no... nothing like that. This mission used to work just fine, it just working now... can't think what I've done to my setup that would have broken this mission and not any of the others...

[Tar-Palantir]

Have you tried looking thought the mission in Wordpad? Somtimes this will show up problems which can easy be fixed or deleted. OTOH I had a problem with a mission that sounds identical to yours. I eventually ended up rebuilding the mission.

Good luck!

[diamondgeezer]

*counts the number of time's he already mentioned editing in Notepad in this thread*

*runs out of fingers*

[EdrickV]

Try running it under a debug build and look in fs.log and errorlog.txt for any messages that may not have shown up. Also, double check your free harddrive space. Direct X likes to crash if there isn't much left.

[vadar_1]

do you have any custom sounds in the mission or in the sounds table? If one is missing, corrupt, or just not the exact specifications, the mission will just kinda die like that. Its not your friendly ships or weapons error here.

[Deathstorm]

How big are your ships and weapons tbl files?  I know it's a bit of a basic suggestion, but sometimes they can cause silly things to happen when you get near to the 380Kb-odd limit.

[Star Dragon]

Someone shoot the BEAM of Welcome...

  Flame throwers are under the seats,
  Exits are to your left and right,
  and if you see a Shivan it's just Carl (so stand down)

[Wohoo I got to welcome someone ]

BTW with the OLD DTP table limit .exes my ships and weaps are pushing around 640KB each

[diamondgeezer]

Deathstorm mate, thanks but... I have been doing this stuff for a while now

[Deathstorm]

No insult intended.  Just on the off-chance.  My FS2 copy used to be very... stubborn at times and tended to do strange things without much provocation.

BTW: Flame throwers?  I was expecting rail guns.

[Star Dragon]

Everything works together (all mod) BUT the veritechs will not change without event mission trigger (and then only for others ALPHA 1 cannot be changed). If I damage sbsystem to change I have to start teh mission in guardian mode. Also all the normal veritechs have no engine glows!!! The vf1s is fine. ALso every ship has a thruster sound of a colonial viper from galactica though I did not import those sounds and the wav file has a different name?!:confused:   Not a major set of problems, more like some mysterious things that happen when you make all the universed collide...

[Edit]  Oh yeah the powers that be(?) determined that Flamethrowers were vouge for now...

[EdrickV]

The FS2 exes released do not have AI code for Veritechs to specifically transform. Engine glows were removed when the transformation was added because the glow points did not vanish when the ships transformed. (The VF-1S doesn't transform so has glow points.)  And for the player you have to have something do set-subsystem-strength on Alpha 1 (ignore FRED2's complaints) and it should work. You have to manually edit the ship name though, FRED2 doesn't want those SEXPs used on the player ship but fs2.exe has no problems with them. It's normally set to use the key-pressed SEXP using g. Hopefully that fake turret method will become obsolete in the future. (With the source code released, there are better methods to do transformations that we have been working on.)

[diamondgeezer]

OK, the problem has been identified, so here's what happened (for future reference):

A process of elimination reveled that the mysterious crash was being caused by the very first SEXP in the events list. Specifically, it was when I tried to use subsys-set-random on two of my corvettes, so the solution was to ignore it and manually set the various subsytem strengths. The odd thing was, the mission had been working perfectly during the building and testing... it was only when I tried it having not touched it on a couple of months that it all went weird. The two corvettes are mods, but like I say the'd been working fine up until then. Strange, no?

Anyway, that's one more inexplicable crash cleared up, and we are all that little bit wiser for it