Peculiar error upon attempting to preview a mission, It says only "Picture" Options

[MattyDienhoff]

After a several month long hiatus from the game, I loaded up my good ol' copy of OFP today to play around. Eventually I found an old mission I was making before I tired of the game most recently. It's called "Tourist", a multiplayer mission for half a dozen players which is basically just one of the game's islands filled with civilians, police (who attack you if you misbehave), traffic on the roads (including buses following routes and stopping at the stops and the occasional Cessna flying over), and hidden military hardware to wreak havoc with, all sorts of stuff like that. I've made a similar mission on Everon (which I completed) and it's a real blast to play with some friends, I never actually released it, though.

Anyway, the Nogova version is still heavily WIP and I've only got a sixth of the island 'detailed', I've decided to resume work on it, it loaded okay once I tracked down all the addons I was missing, and I put myself down as a civvie at the airport to take a look around, and pressed "preview". I saw the "Get ready..." screen, and then, I was returned to the mission editor screen with a peculiar dialogue box saying "Picture". That's all, just "Picture", with an OK button below it. I press OK, and I'm back in the mission editor screen. Funnily enough, if I now press "Continue", the mission loads up in-game and I can play around, but only then. So it works, sort of, but with a weird error message. That can't be good.

Has anyone else had this error message happen, know what the message is about, or know what causes it?

[JdB]

It appears to me that a picture is missing, a pathname is incorrect/outdated, or the picture is not compliant with the filetypes supported by the game (rather unlikely).

[MattyDienhoff]

It appears to me that a picture is missing, a pathname is incorrect/outdated, or the picture is not compliant with the filetypes supported by the game (rather unlikely).

How could that be? There is no overview or briefing yet, and I don't know where else a picture would be used in a mission.

[JdB]

How could that be? There is no overview or briefing yet, and I don't know where else a picture would be used in a mission.

In that case I have no idea, sorry...

[Linker Split]

can you post your description.ext pease?

[MattyDienhoff]

The mission has no description.ext yet. Besides the mission.sqm, the mission folder only contains an init.sqs and a script (which closes all of the doors of the buildings on Nogova) called nogova_doors_closed.sqs. The init.sqs is short, all it does is create a black fade in effect at the start, set the terrain detail to high, and execute the close doors script.

So as you can see, the mission itself contains no images, so I guess it must be an addon causing the error. The only thing left to do is delete everything from large sections of the map at a time and see if that fixes it.

Sorry guys, I really should have mentioned the details in the original post to save you some time.

[MattyDienhoff]

I figured it out!

It was a missing addon after all. "Noeflags.pbo", which contains a national flag for Nogova and a unique one for each town, was missing. I'd used flags from the pack on flagposts in various towns. It's pretty strange that the game, when it couldn't find the flags, gave the mysterious "picture" error, rather than an error message like you'd expect, such as "Missing addon noeflags.pbo" or "/noeflags/vidlakov.jpg not found".

Anyway, all sorted.