[Dark Hunter]

I downloaded a nebula pack off of Singh's Background Emporium, but when I pasted it into the stars.tbl, it crashed FRED (strangely, Freespace Open isn't affected at all). At first, I thought it was because the table had too many entries, but even when I reduced it (a lot) it crashed FRED. So I'm wondering what it is about these nebulas that makes FRED angry.

The pack is a variant of Lightspeed's Nebula Pack, with the effects as .dds rather than .tga. I'm also running FSOpen 3.6.9 RC5, and using 3.6.9 FRED2 as well.


UPDATE: This is really odd. I don't think the stars.tbl is causing this after all....... EVERY SINGLE version of FRED I have is malfunctioning!  NONE of them are able to do anything than say they have "encountered a problem and need to close". I tried FRED 3.6.9 RC5, 3.6.9 RC3, 3.6.8 CVS, 3.6.7, and retail FRED. No matter which mod is selected, no matter which version I use, they all crash. What is goin on here?

[karajorma]

Retail FRED crashes without error?

My initial suspicion was that you'd not installed the media VPs to their own folder and they they were causing this problem but that error kinda blows that theory out of the water. Retail FRED would crash with a table error not silently as you claim.

What happens with the debug builds of FRED?

[Dark Hunter]

Sorry, I got a little carried away. Retail FRED gives me table errors, as usual. Sorry about not making that distinction.

However, all Open builds of FRED are crashing without giving me an error.

Media VP's eh? I've had the Zeta VP's out in the main FS2 folder for a long time now and they've never caused problems before, with FSOpen or FRED. I'll try removing them to their own folder.

[karajorma]

What table errors does FRED give? I suspect that you're dealing with a rogue table or corrupt VP most likely.

[Dark Hunter]

Well what do you know! Those alpha patches for 3.6.9 screw FRED up! Good to know this. Anyways, it's working now.

[karajorma]

The work fine for me with FRED 3.6.9. Can't be certain they work with earlier builds though.

[Dark Hunter]

Yeah my main FRED build is the 3.6.8 one.... you know, now that I think about it those would mess it up. Makes sense now I think about it.

[Dark Hunter]

It happened again. All of a sudden all of my Open FRED builds just....QUIT. I cannot express in words just how... aggravating this is, because there is no reason at all fo them to stop working. The computer thinks that they are performing access violations, why I don't know cause twelve hours ago they worked just fine, and NOTHING has changed, to my knowledge, since then.

I'm especially mad at this (I'm trying very hard not to lose my cool) because I am in the middle of writing a campaign, and once school starts up again progress will be so slow.... also this is the second time in less than a week FRED stopped working.

Please help!

[karajorma]

To be honest I've got no idea what could cause that sort of thing. If you haven't changed anything then nothing should change unless you have deeper problems with the underlying OS.

[Dark Hunter]

FRED Open might require OpenAL, am I right? If so, I wonder if maybe my father turned it off. I'll check once I get back from work.

[Dark Hunter]

This is too bizarre. I ran the OpenAL Installer again, and now everything's working... I guess AL must have been turned off after all, somehow.