Just out of curiosity, what is the current status of FRED? The last build I got generates unuseable missions. Granted I don't use it much, but there are probably some who are wondering the same thing.

Just out of curiosity, what is the current status of FRED? The last build I got generates unuseable missions. Granted I don't use it much, but there are probably some who are wondering the same thing.

There's a new build in the TI forum that has support for Goober's new conditionals. The Mission briefing icon problems are still there as far as I know but it does seem to make working missions.

I've been working on one lately that works perfectly... except for the errors that it doesn't have anything to do with (problems with the tables).

I use FRED 3.5.5 because it works. I'm not a huge fan of the OGL FREDs, and the warning system is just plain annoying. It would be nice for a new workable FRED with most of the bugs fixed, perhaps with new features that have already been suggested, such as a mission background importer?

Taylor and kazan are working on it AFAIK (at least I hope so, because
WC-Saga needs it badly too).

@Taylor : Can you give us a small progress-update please ?

@Taylor : Can you give us a small progress-update please ?

Pretty much stalled at the moment. My experimental code tree that I normally work out of doesn't work with FRED at the moment for some reason. I changed some OGL things that work ok in game but not FRED so the screen is just black and I haven't been able to figure out which change actually caused that.

I know that the briefing icons are getting clipped out of view but the same code works in game and it should work in non-HTL at least but it doesn't. There is something weird with the view there but when I modified to the code the deal with it the icons just kind of fly around the screen, when they actually show up. I thought I had it fixed at one point and was going to release a build but in further testing only a few icons actually worked properly.

At one time I thought I had traced the positioning problems to a perspective issue but that was a dead end. May have been on the right track there but I think it would take someone else to get anything useful out of the idea. I've just stared at the code for too long and you start to miss the obvious stuff that way.

I heard that RandomTiger was back and working on FRED again. Hopefully he can have time to get to these problems in more detail and pick up where I've left off. I have already commited some FRED related fixes into CVS and have a couple more going in this weekend but they don't help much in the grand scheme of things.

I know it's not the most promising progress update but that's all I've got at the moment.

I was actually having some problems with Goober's latest version of FRED. I was testing out the argument options, but every time I tried to save the mission, FRED would crash. Now, I successfully altered another mission in that FRED, but I wasn't using the arguments. That means that: a ) this version doesn't like the arguments, b ) this version doesn't like MY arguments, c ) you can alter missions fine in this version, but it hates creating one, d ) this version of FRED doesn't like XP (SP2). I've gotta do some experimentation to narrow this down.

Later!

You need to pay more attention to the thread, then. I fixed the crash bug only three days after karajorma reported it:
http://www.sectorgame.com/forums/viewto ... 4805#14805

You say in that post, that you fixed the bug in the 1018 build, but that's the build I'm using. Did you update the 1018 build AFTER posting it?

[Edit]

OK. Just incase there was some sort of corruption in the download, I grabbed it a second time and re-extracted FRED. I then created a basic mission, saved it, and started in the the argument events. I've had no crashes, but the error message I'm getting is somewhat puzzling. I'm attempting to recreate a training simulation, where all ships have a guardian flag, and if any ship's hull strength gets below 5%, it becomes invulnerable, protected, its primary dammage is repaired, and it is ordered to warpout. By primary dammage, I mean hull, engines, and communications. Now, in an event using arguments, I replace any entry that would normally be filled by a ship, with <argument>. Since the game doesn't have a specific ship to reference, it doesn't know what subsystems may be on that ship, so the only option other than <argument> in the second line of the repair-subsystem sexp, is hull, which is common to models. For engines and comm., I add them manually, just as the list of ships in the initial arguments list. Unfortunately, when I save, it tells me that there is an error in this event, and that "Hull" is the error. What's up with that? How can "Hull" be an error but "engines" isn't? I can see 3 possibilities:

1 ) there are a few kinks to be worked out

2 ) I'm trying to do something ouside what the arguments option is capable of

3 ) I don't have enough knowledge of what I'm doing to understand it, like trying to navigate through a glacier in a blizzard, using infrared glasses.

Can someone put me in the right?

While I'm here, I'd like to make a SEXP request... repair-all-dammage. When used, it repairs all dammage to any subsystem, submodel, and of course the hull, of the selected ship. Since there are no specifics, said sexp could allow multiple entries for ships, wings, and of course, the <argument> option.

Later!

[/Edit]

It's probably displaying the error because "<argument>" is not a ship and thus doesn't have any subsystems. Also, it will only display the first error for a sexp and then stop, which is why it mentions Hull but not the other stuff. Does it work okay in-game?

I use FRED 3.5.5 because it works. I'm not a huge fan of the OGL FREDs, and the warning system is just plain annoying. It would be nice for a new workable FRED with most of the bugs fixed, perhaps with new features that have already been suggested, such as a mission background importer?

I don't mind the warning system, it can be useful. And you know Lightspeed's fancy background media doesn't work with most 3.5.5 builds right (IIRC) ?

It's probably displaying the error because "<argument>" is not a ship and thus doesn't have any subsystems. Also, it will only display the first error for a sexp and then stop, which is why it mentions Hull but not the other stuff. Does it work okay in-game?

I just tried this mission and it crashed the game. When I'm in the tech room, as soon as I select the mission and click commit, it opens up the debugger with the same error message as FRED's giving me. Now, a repeair-all-dammage sexp would probably overcome the problem for this specific situation, but I highly doubt that this is the only time that this issue will crop up. The problem is that FRED and FS2 won't "take my word for it" that whatever is to take over for <argument> has a "hull" to repair, so it assumes its an error.

If you're interested, I was testing this under Taylor's 10-22 build.

Test it under my 10-18 build. If that doesn't work, email me the mission and I'll take a look.

The problem is, your build doesn't have Taylor's Pilot code included. I've completely transitioned over to this format. Now, I've used his build to test a mission that included the change-alt-name sexp, so we know that the argument stuff is included in that build.

I have webspace, though I have to configure my PC to upload to it again. I've had to do this several times because of a series of HDD failures. I'll post a link to the mission as soon as I've got it up. It should be compatable with standard FSO tables since it only uses the Perseus and Loki.

[Edit]
Goober, PM Sent
[/Edit]

The problem is, your build doesn't have Taylor's Pilot code included. I've completely transitioned over to this format.

Just a note that all of my code is in CVS as of yesterday so any future builds should have my bmpman changes and the new pilot code.