[Akalabeth Angel]

Hi, I've been editing the ship.tbl for my campaign. In addition to adding a few units here and there I've also reorganised a lot of the ships so they have a more logical order. For instance I put the older terran fighters together, then the newer ones and the elite fighters at the end.

  Anyways, after re-organising most of the tbl, a lot of the ships which have the "in tech database" flag are not in the database, while others without the flag are. This is after viewing the techroom with a brand new pilot btw. I don't understand what the deal is. What's the point of "in tech database" if it doesn't do a damn thing?

[diamondgeezer]

It's always been screwy. V designed it to recognise the order in which ships are in, not the flag. Or something. I thought the SCP monkies fixorated it. Maybe one of them can shed some light

[Akalabeth Angel]

I just changed the my custom ships.tbl to something other than table so that it would use the vanilla FS2 ships, and then brought up a new pilot and looked at the tech database again and there's still stuff in there that shouldn't be. For a pilot who hasn't flown any missions at all in the FS2 campaign, already the Erinyes, Sathanas , Knossos and others are visible. Maybe I just have to reinstall the damn thing to get the list that I want or something. There's little point in keeping the plot of a campaign secret if a bunch of spoiler units are visible in the database.

[diamondgeezer]

I told you, it's always been screwy. What more do you want from me?

[Bobboau]

with your tables active, make a new pilot

[Akalabeth Angel]

I'm not cursing you out diamond, just complaining to the world at large.

I'll try it out Bobboau, though I think I've already tried that (btw, I'm using vanilla FS2 not FS2_open)

[diamondgeezer]

OK. Read my first post again, and bear in mind that when an SCP monkey says "with your tables active, make a new pilot", assume he's talking about FSO.

I'll say this once more: retail FS2 has a screwy approach to the tech database

[Akalabeth Angel]

Okiedokie, I just created a brand new pilot like Bobboau said and it actually worked. Yeehaw. Thanks. I thought I'd already done that but apparently not, I think the problem was I looked at it with an old pilot, then went to the barracks and made a new one and looked again. As opposed to starting FS2, creating a new pilot at the start screen, and then proceeding from there.

   Thanks.

[Bobboau]

well, I mean't with either, it's a common error when adding new data, and this particular issue has been a problem sence FS1.

[Goober5000]

It's simply a function of the way the tech database is organized.  The flags didn't get reset from campaign to campaign, so any new ships.tbl inherited the positions of the previous ship list.

This can be fixed by 1) creating a new pilot, as you did; 2) adding the "uses custom tech database" flag in the fred2_open campaign editor, or 3) using the "reset-tech-database" sexp in fred2_open.

[CP5670]

You know, I was actually doing the same rearranging with my PI ships and weapons files just a few days ago. I did 2 and 3 there and had no problems in the end.