Unlike Windows, it is not necessary to "clean sweep" or purge-remove FS2_Open in normal troubleshooting process. You don't need to delete the game and rebuild it, since you can very effectively determine what data the game uses - as is demonstrated by the fact that the "core game" (I assume you refer to using no mediaVP's or mods) works normally. However, if you really want to do it... Here's how to ensure "tabula rasa" in a very easy and fast way without any risk of losing data:
1. Rename your current FS2 directory to FS2_broken or something like that. Then, create a new directory for the game, let's say C:\Games\FreeSpace2\ . Don't delete the old directory outright before you've made sure that you've taken any files from it that you don't want to re-download or recreate.
2. Open your old "broken" FS2 dir and locate the following files:
root_fs2.vp - 6,255 KB
smarty_fs2.vp - 120,241 KB
sparky_fs2.vp - 254,457 KB
sparky_hi_fs2.vp - 259,026 KB
stu_fs2.vp - 169,108 KB
tango1_fs2.vp - 191,297 KB
tango2_fs2.vp - 71,073 KB
tango3_fs2.vp - 49,314 KB
warble_fs2.vp - 116 073 KB3. Open the new, currently empty ..\FreeSpace2\ directory and copy the aforementioned files into that directory. You now have all the original FS2 data that you need in the directory (although you may want to add multiplayer mission packs and cutscene packs, but these files are what you really need, everything else is optional). In fact you can install FS2_Open on a computer by simply using this method; the game takes care of creating necessary registry entries and cache directory and ini files.
4. Aquire the latest Launcher.exe and a FreeSpace2 Open executable. At the moment I recommend getting the 3.6.10 RC1 (release candidate 1) build from
here.
5. Start the launcher, select the executable, configure settings and start the game to make sure everything works. If done correctly, you should now have a working FS2_Open installation with the original, retail FS2 data.
6. Download the mediaVP files manually from a location that gives you intact files.
Check that the downloaded data matches the given verification checksums after you have extracted the VP files from the 7z files (or whichever compression is used). Sometimes even if the download is uncorrupted, the extraction phase can cause some corruption, though this is rare...
7. Create a mod directory (
..\FreeSpace2\mediavps\ ) and place the extracted MediaVP files in this directory.
8. Enable mediaVP's via Launcher.
Of course, you can skip a lot of job by simply removing or renaming your current, obviously broken mediavps directory as well as removing or renaming the
..\FreeSpace2\data\ to
..\FreeSpace2\broken_data\ and just do the steps 6-8, and if it doesn't still work, we'll need to take look at the file integrity of the mediaVP mirrors in general.
Which is why it would be very helpful of you to tell where exactly you keep getting corrupt MediaVP's. Please tell this to us because these corruption issues are popping up way too often for it to be acceptable.
