Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Nottingham, England
Posts: 1470

Well, I've been creating a rather large mission for the last few days and have been encountering some rather strange problems in getting it to work. The mission is a recreation of the final battle to retake Earth vs. the G.O.D. satellites in Endgame and the problem is that when I have a certain number of ships jumping in (16 or more and not necessarily at the same or similar times) the mission refuses to start loading and FS2 dumps you back to the desktop. I've tried using FS2 Open 1.4 and with 2.0 but neither works. I've found other factors that stop the mission loading and all are probably related to the sheer size of the mission (54 G.O.D. satellites, 31 capital ships, 500+ of fighters). Strangely when there are no events and no arrivals the mission runs fine so it's not simply becaue of the number of vessels on screen (which even runs at a decent speed as well!) but likely to be due to some other factor.

I was wondering if anybody else has come across anything similar or knows of a workaround or is just interested in the bug.

If there is a solution/workaround then I'd be happy to hear from anyone

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Registered: May 2003
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Posts: 3

Freespace 2 has problems to handle with large fleets. The developer already said so and there is no other way then to reduce the amount of ships in a mission.
Especially when more then 3 capships enter the mission at once fs has short <stops> :-/

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Registered: Apr 2001
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Posts: 1901

I limit myself to 50 ships. Anything over the magical number of 50 is asking for trouble on some or all computers.

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Nottingham, England
Posts: 1470

I understand that, I was just wondering if there was anything specific to this situation as the mission works fine until you start implementing certain events rather than just crashing with the number of ships.

Anyway, this mission was just an experiment (mostly stuff going on in the background that doesn't actually affect the mission at all) so nothing much is lost other than time making the mission.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: belleville IL USA
Posts: 1428

it has problems when you have a certan number of ships in game, meaning if you have 'max number of ships-1' and a wing of fighters jump in it is going to crash, this is simply the way it is and always has been

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Registered: Jan 2003
Location: Provo, Utah
Posts: 10

I had the same problem with a mission that I created. It was...or rather is...the same mission. Everytime I started the mission the game dropped back to the desktop. I removed a number of larger ships, and the mission started to work. If you want to see my mission, or vice versa, contact me. We might be able to work together on it.

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Registered: Jan 2003
Location: Aveiro
Posts: 192

I know this is not a Fred 2/Freespace 2 Open specific bug, but...

is the game supposed to crash when calling in for a rearm vessel?
(which by the way is an aurora?!?!?!? I think...)

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Transylvania, ROMANIA
Posts: 1040

hmmm...Smells like "Endor Syndrom" to me...Prepare for quarantine.

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eng Horatiu Popovici

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: UK
Posts: 1185

Doesn't FRED start calling you names if you create a mission with that many ships? I seem to remember reading that somewhere.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Finland
Posts: 3194

Yeah... That has happened to me once, and that time I didn't even have that much ships, something else triggered it.

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Nottingham, England
Posts: 1470

The vast, vast majority of the ships would have been carefully scripted to produce a rather cinematic backdrop to the player-controlled action that can still be singled out and salvaged as a mission. Therefore the so-called "Battle of Endor" syndrome would not have been a problem as the player can only affect what happens to half a dozen satellites, around 30 fighters and 2-3 capital ships.

To be honest I've given up this mission idea as it seems to be a little infeasible given the current engine limitations, which is a shame. Panther - I'd be happy to help but I don't see things working out with the concept to be honest

In the non-TBP Open version of Fred 2 you could only have a maximum of 100 ships (including fighters) before error messages started to appear. It appears that until these remaining problems are sorted that that 100 ship limit is a sensible maximum to work to.

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Registered: May 2003
Location:
Posts: 19

Wow! i limit myself much further behind that....
with my P2 450mhz anyway... otherwise over 20 or so... and it chokes... but thats why I'm putting the game on my p4 now..

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Nottingham, England
Posts: 1470

I have an AMD Athlon 2000+ with 512MB DDRRAM and a 64MB GeForce 4MX and the number of ships in general combat that I mentioned (54 G.O.D. satellites, 31 capital ships, 500+ of fighters) seems to run fine with no slowdown in 1024x768. Because it ran fine here is the only reason that I decided to make such a mission.

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Registered: Mar 2001
Location: Charlottesville, VA, USA
Posts: 169

I had a similar problem when I made a "Severed Dreams" type mission. 30 caps ships is right around the limit for FS2 but too many fighters will cause a crash too. It consisted or 1 Orion station and 2 Omegas with 6 fighter wings(6 per wing) against 2 Omegas and 2 Hyperions with 6 wings(6 per wing) and the game crashed when the attacking fleet jumped in. I fixed it by having the cap ships jump in first, 5 seconds later half of the fighters and then the other half 5 seconds after that. I also removed the wing of fighters(6) I had escorting a breaking pod. The game can handle a lot of ships but they all just can't jump in at once. This was on a P4 2.4B @ 2.9GHz w/ 512MB pc3500 DDR and a GF4 Ti4400 @ 290/600.

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Last edited by Ranger1 on 05-29-2003 at 08:12 PM

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Registered: Apr 2001
Location:
Posts: 1901

Part of it is memory...if you have a old computer with 64mb of RAM...whooowee....you may have troubles no mater what.

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Registered: Jan 2003
Location: Provo, Utah
Posts: 10

Triggy, I think that mission can work even with the limit. When the source code changes come through the mission can be modified. For right now I would like to ask the community for their opinion on what should be added to the mission. I would really like to present it to the everyone as part of a campaign. I don't have any web space to post it, so if anyone wants to try it out and give me advice, just private message me with an e-mail address. Also, if anyone knows how to change Avi-s into ANIs, or to get Avi-s functional in a mission, please let me know.

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Registered: Jan 2003
Location: Provo, Utah
Posts: 10

quote:

---

Originally posted by Panther
it to the everyone as part of a campaign.

---

I was learned English good

I'm almost better at French and Spanish now than my native tongue, go figure.

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