[karajorma]

Why aren't you simply selecting the ship, pressing SHIFT-S to open the ship editor and changing the IFF there?

Post a mission which doesn't work. If there is an IFF problem it needs to be fixed. You might also want to try this to see if it works for you. I knocked it up in about 30 seconds in FRED to prove that there is no issue with friendly shivans.



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[Roanoke]

would notepad do the trick ?

[karajorma]

Probably but I really can't see why he has to resort to it. Setting Shivan ships to friendly in FRED worked perfectly well for me.

[Warnstaff]

Why aren't you simply selecting the ship, pressing SHIFT-S to open the ship editor and changing the IFF there?

The ships register as hostile when I do it of the time. Sometimes (but seemingly rare) it works. It worked at first, then it went back to hostile. Most the missions that have been damaged by this were deleted a while ago in favor of my new methood, so I currently don't have any, and ATM, it's working (don't expect it to last though like last time).

I've found the IFF in the ship editor thing to stop working (for me) after "friendlifying" several wings of shivan ships, and it's especially bad when the player wing has shivan ships in it. I'll work on gettting a friendly=hostile situation going on and post the mission, but it may take some time, and probly destroy another misison.

Of course, I *MIGHT* get lucky and it'll start working (make things easier).

[Warnstaff]

I've now encountered a second problem. I've started out with 3 wings of maras, and 9 gas miners. I add 2 fighters and crashes. I delete all but 4 miners, and I can put no more then 4 new fighters total before crashing. Mission attached.

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[karajorma]

I tried it and it let me put in as many fighters as I wanted. I'l do some further testing in a bit and see if I can get it to crash.

EDIT : Couldn't get it to crash. No idea what you're doing wrong but the only crashes I got were due to having 5 secondary weapons on the Nephilim (which only has 4 secondary banks!) and the fact that you still have the Serephim and Nephilim as player flyable dispite the fact that no good will probably come of trying to do that.

Once I fixed those problems in the table the mission was perfectly stable in debug FRED with or without the media VPs.

My only advice is to run the debug version of FRED and tell me what error it spits out when it crashes.

[Warnstaff]

I'll try the debug FRED thing tomorrow (it's 4 am here, and I need sleep). And the fighter I was trying to add were myrms and Ulysses.

I've actually been abel to get both Nephilim and Seriphim bombers working. The nephilim tends to crash when it's involved in the ship and weapons selection as the selected unit. Aside from that, you can't change secondary weapons on either. The nephilim will be in scramble missions, and Seriphims are a "special case" bomber.


Hmmmmm, what version of FRED are you using? I'm using a later version (I think), and that may be the problem.

[karajorma]

I compile my own from CVS and it has some new team loadout changes that haven't reached CVS so it is different from the build you'll be using. That said I did try the mission with an earlier release version and it was fine.

One other thing though. If FRED eats one of your missions don't delete it. I could repair most damaged missions pretty quickly in notepad even before I was a coder. It's also woth pointing out that FRED saves .bak files which are basically the previous mission save and also autosaves your mission every 5-10 minutes or so as Backup.00x.

[Warnstaff]

I didn't know that notepad could be used in FRED!

Any chance of that new build coming out soon?

[karajorma]

I'm in the middle of adding a bunch of my features to FRED. They've been in CVS for ages but seeing as how I didn't understand MFC I couldn't add them to FRED  so you could only add them via SEXP or with notepad.

Soon as I'm done I'll post a build.

[neoterran]

kara, since you're the only person that seems to be building at the moment do you think you can turn on support for optimizations for SSE in your builds and do 2 release builds, one with SSE optimizations (ala P4 / Athlon / P3) and one general build, like redmenace used to back in March ?

[karajorma]

Not certain how to be honest. I suspect I know which switches and levers to pull but unless someone knows for certain I'm sticking to the unoptimised builds.

[neoterran]

If you're building with VS 2003, as I suspect you may, check out this article : http://xona.com/2004/06/29.html

[karajorma]

Unfortunately I'm using VC6

The best you can expect is that they will compile, but you will still lose the use of your debugger.

That's me out then. If I get hold of VC.net at some point I'll give it a try though.

[neoterran]

Oh well. When you make the jump, you might as well just go straight to vs 2005, it's a lot better.

[karajorma]

I'll upgrade eventually but seeing as I'm learning MFC from a teach yourself Visual C 6 book, now's not the time

[neoterran]

No, of course, actually, you'll want to keep a VC6 Install on one dev machine because you'll probably run into trouble trying to build this on VS 2005.

[Warnstaff]

Good news guys. I gone back to using the april 21st build for FRED (I think it's the 04/21 one) and have not had any problems so far. If it keeps up like this, then the campaign will be back on at full speed again!

[neoterran]

http://www.penguinbomb.com/lightspeed/SMW03weapons.html

You might want to check out the shivan weapons on this page by lightspeed, those might be fun to incorporate in your mod.

[karajorma]

Good news guys. I gone back to using the april 21st build for FRED (I think it's the 04/21 one) and have not had any problems so far. If it keeps up like this, then the campaign will be back on at full speed again!

What were you using? The 21st is the newest build of FRED apart from one I released a couple of days ago.