[Kaoru]

Well, damnit.
Pardon my French, but I'm really loving the voice-acted, spiffy-graphics Derelict campaign. And when I say 'love', I'm talking the kind of love that you drive 4,000 miles and visit a foreign country for, I'm talking the kind of love that the Romans wrote epic poems about, I'm talking about the 'I-don't-just-want-to-have-your-children,-I-want-to-pay-you-to-let-me-have-your-children' kind of love.

So you can imagine my consternation when I finish "Return to the Hulk" and find the next mission is...
Non-existent.
Do I need to go back and play the last non-SOC mission and just not do the SOC thing to go forward, or something? This is really bumming me out.

Incidentally, at first I couldn't even get Derelict to work - with the basic "Derelict" package included with the latest version of SCP. So I went and looked up and downloaded the initial campaign and all four of the add-on packs. It's been working great so far - once I had those in the Derelict folder, it loaded up and let me play just fine. I gotta admit, I had my doubts about this campaign at first, but that was just for the first three minutes.

As soon as I heard the work "Duct tape", I started smiling. Up until I started a mission with no objectives, no parameters, and no background after completing "RttH", I hadn't stopped that initial smile.

What do I need to do to fix this? 

[Game_Master64]

this is a new one...i think. try skipping the mission

[MP-Ryan]

That's a new one.  Try running in debug mode, see if you get any errors.

[jr2]

eh,

[Kaoru]

There's no 'skip mission' button in the blank-screen. That's what puzzles me. There's no objectives, no mission name, no limit on what ships or weapons you can equip - it's like the game pulls up an empty mission and just tries to sell it to me as is. There's certainly no "skip loop" button.

I went ahead and ran the debugger, and encountered this error, but I'm not sure if it would have anything to do with the map - it sounds like it'd just have more to do with the standard blackness I was surrounded by when I started the mission. "Warning: Unable to find a sufficient number of bitmaps for this mission's background. The background will not be displayed. File: J:\src\cvs\fs2_open_3_6_9.final\code\Starfield\Starfield.cpp
Line: 3396
[This filename points to the location of a file on the computer that built this executable] Warning: Unable to find a sufficient number of bitmaps for this mission's background.  The background will not be displayed.
File:J:\src\cvs\fs2_open_3_6_9.final\code\Starfield\StarField.cpp
Line: 3396
[This filename points to the location of a file on the computer that built this executable]

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
    parse_bitmaps()    parse_mission()    parse_main()    mission_load()    game_start_mission()    game_enter_state()    gameseq_set_state()    game_process_event()    gameseq_process_events()    game_main()    WinMain()    WinMainCRTStartup()    kernel32.dll 7c816fd7()
------------------------------------------------------------------

Home after an exhausting day (Derelict prevented me from sleeping last night...or eating!) and still puzzled and depressed. I'm going to check out the files in my Derelict directory, make sure they look all right, but...well, I've got a lot more experience modding Hearts of Iron, Homeworld, Medieval / Rome Total War, and Starcraft than I do modding Freespace, and the experience I've got in those areas is laughable compared to what I've seen others do, even so. I'm rather stuck in a rut, here, with no idea of the source of my problem - my closest guess would be that for some reason the 'next mission' in the campaign string doesn't exist, or isn't being read properly. Is "Return to the Hulk" the last mission in, say, the SCR Derelict 1 pack? 'Cuz it might be a problem reading the second pack, but...well, like I said, I'm just not sure.
Thanks for the quick responses, though!

[Game_Master64]

if you fail the mission 5 times it gives you the option to skip it. just jump out as soon as the mission starts. lather, rinse, repeat x5. or try reinstalling derelict

[Kaoru]

It was quite a doozy figuring out how to fail a mission in which I did not even have the pleasure of a large enemy ship to crash myself into - but I managed it! I probably could've done it with some Infyrno burst-missiles, or helios torpedos, but instead I just alt-K-suicided. A lot.
The next mission's blank, too. I'm going to try re-unzipping the Derelict files, and hope for the best, 'cuz it would suck to just have my campaign come to a screeching halt here.

God, that black starfield was creepier than the nebula, though.

EDIT: Replaced all the old .vp files with newly unzipped ones. Is there a problem with the newer versions of Blaise's files on Filefront? I noticed they had low ratings, but...figured people just weren't voting on them. If I recall, there were older versions of both the DerelictSCP and the Derelict SCP1 file. I think I'll try downloading them, see where it lands me...
But if that doesn't work...I guess my campaign will have arrived at a dead end.

EDIT 2: Figured it out! Acting on a hunch, I delved into my missions folder, and sure enough, I found that quick-fix Blaise had introduced for someone else's problem. I remember downloading it because I was worried I might end up having the same problem. I guess, for some reason, it was overwriting the mission with blank data...but now it works, since I deleted that!
And the modified Typhon-station in the loading screen looks sweet as ever!
-Kaoru

[Game_Master64]

oh ya, i forgot derelict used moded loading screens