PTO Startup - Mission File Fails to load

[Daiwilletti]

This is driving me nuts . It is not a specific mission, just the startup screen. All other installs start fine.

I've just done a search of forum threads. A lot of people have had this problem over time.

Several suggested fixes:

1. Italflyer suggests selecting the enemy fighter first when in dogfight QC mode.
2. Another person suggested that if any of the default aircraft are faulty this could happen. However, if the uisel.xml does not call for default aircraft, why would this be a problem?
3. An interesting suggestion is to disable UI animations in the configoverrides file.

I'll report back if I can ever fix this blasted issue. One other problem is I can't get ground spawns or frontline spawns to work, and I suspect whatever the problem is, it is common to the mission file error message on startup, and the failure of ground and frontline spawns to work.

[MajorMagee]

For me it's most often the result of (in order of frequency)

Missing referenced sound files (runs the first time, but then won't restart)
Missing referenced weapons (CFS3 remembers the previous loadout sequence number and inappropriately tries to reuse it on the next aircraft selected instead of "clean")
Missing referenced aircraft (I changed the name or removed the last model I was flying while working on mods. This includes the aircraft I was flying against in QC)
Missing referenced location (I tried a mission that did not match the mod version I was in)

[mongoose]

I always keep a copy uisel.xml file around; in fact already out of dogfight mode; and copy that into the appdata file. MajorMagee's point about sounds is relevant but not WRT uisel and some QC issues which may crop up in his latter points. Worse come to worse. I delete the appdata file, rename (to the same!) in the MultiCFS3.exe, re run cfg.exe ,and add back into the ConfigOverrides.xml file my shaders' settings, and also a copy of my non standard ViewUI.xml file plus any .xva file like CFS3_X56.xca.

Again this does not help with sound file issues, and may not help certain issues, as I have found!

[MajorMagee]

Editing the game.xml to have ShowUIWorld="false" is the fastest way to reliably get the game running again, so you can change your selection away from whatever broke things.

[mongoose]

Might add to knowledge base?

[Daiwilletti]

Thanks guys for the replies. I had to bight the bullet and do a fresh build of PTO Solomon's from the ground up. Then (with fingers crossed) I had to add all my xdp tweaks to ships, vehicles, facilities, spawns. Somehow it all works! The opening screen now loads without flashing.

Which means I can get back to my original work of setting up ground and frontline files allowing groundtype=direct, so I can get an interesting campaign going over Guadalcanal.