FRED2 Retail Technical Help

Crashes & Corrupt Missions

My mission keeps crashing FreeSpace

There are a lot of reasons why FreeSpace could be crashing

1) Battle of Endor Syndrome - The number of ships FreeSpace can deal with at one time depends on the computer it is running on. Many mission designers fall into the trap of trying to create giant space battles like the ones they saw in Star Wars. Unfortunately the computer can rarely handle these and crashes.

2) FreeSpace can only deal with a certain number of ships in a mission. The number varies depending on the number of capital ships in the mission. The more cap ships you put in the fewer wings the game will allow you to have.

3) If you have more than 12 ships in wings Alpha to Epsilon this can cause crashes too. The simple solution is to just rename some of the wings.

4) Mods can often cause problems. If you have a ship or weapons table larger than 380k in size you'll probably get crashes. Even if you haven't broken that limit a mod can be causing the problem. If possible try the mission with no mods installed. It's worth noting that mods to the weapons table cause crashes whenever the player enters the weapons database.

It's worth noting that most of these problems have been rectified by the people working on the Source Code Project. If you can't solve the problem maybe running it on FS2_Open will solve it.

My mission keeps crashing when I try to set the mission in subspace.

The subspace mission stuff is in FS2 but the problem is that FS2 is looking for a file that isn't installed. You can download a MOD from Volition Watch's archives It's only a couple of k in size. Remember to tell anyone who plays your mission that they'll need the file (considering it's size you might as well include it with your campaign or mission).

My mission has become corrupted. What can I do?

The first thing you may wish to do is make a copy of your .bak file. When you save a mission on top of an older copy Fred simply changes the old missions extension to .bak If you copy the .bak file you have a copy of the mission from the previous save. Backing up the .bak file means you can't lose the entire mission. Now open the original .bak file in FRED (you'll have to tell FRED to look for all files instead of just .fs2). Hopefully the .bak won't be corrupted and you can just carry on working on it. Remember when you save to rename the file back to .fs2 or it will save as .bak and FreeSpace won't see it.

I did a lot of work since the last save/The .bak file is also corrupt? Do I have to start from scratch?

Maybe not. FRED has a habit of backing up missions occasionally. Look at the datestamps of the Backup.00x in your Data\Missions folder. Make a copy of them and then try opening them in FRED until you find out which one is the newest non-corrupt one.
If that doesn't help You can open the corrupt .fs2 file with notepad (or any other text editor) and try to find what is wrong with it by comparing it with a working mission. Worst case scenario you can use the text editor to remind you how all your events worked.

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