X2: my ship blows up when attempting to exit a station

[direvus]

So I've been playing X2 for more than a hundred hours and this is the first time I've seen anything like this.

I'm on an M5 courier mission and I take my guy to Solar Power Plant beta in Thuruk's Beard. I dock, he gives me my reward and asks me if I can do the next run. I accept, and I wait for the message. The message comes in, I press ESC to exit the station and suddenly instead of being in space out front of the station, my ship is half embedded in what looks like the wall of the station exterior, and is constantly making the "you're crashing into something" noise. A few seconds later the ship explodes, game over.

So it seems like my ship is being spawned on the wrong side of some geometry here. I have tried exiting the station by flying out (rather than pressing ESC) but that gets the same result.

I tried maneuvering immediately to try to get out of the jam, but that didn't work.

In the end, I loaded the previous autosave and got a different destination for the courier run, and so far no issues.

I'm playing the steam version of X2, on Windows 7.

[Alan Phipps]

If you give the ship AI the navigation command to go somewhere else instead of flying it yourself, does it undock safely? It has been a long while since I played X2 and so this X3 trick may not apply.

[direvus]

If you give the ship AI the navigation command to go somewhere else instead of flying it yourself, does it undock safely? It has been a long while since I played X2 and so this X3 trick may not apply.

Negative. You can't give navigation commands to the active ship while it is inside a station. All of the commands under "Navigation" are greyed out.

So X3 has a variant of this bug also? I guess I've got that to look forward to then ... :/

[Alan Phipps]

Yes X3 has that issue but only with some M6 types internally docking with a few stations, or very wide M6+ models parked at adjacent external docking arms or with a few oddly-configured stations. You will soon learn to recognise the few dangerous situations and make allowances for them.

You need advice on X2 gameplay issues from current players, I'm afraid.

[direvus]

Yes X3 has that issue but only with some M6 types internally docking with a few stations, or very wide M6+ models parked at adjacent external docking arms or with a few oddly-configured stations. You will soon learn to recognise the few dangerous situations and make allowances for them.

Okay, thanks for the heads-up.

You need advice on X2 gameplay issues from current players, I'm afraid.

It's cool, in the end I avoided the bug by loading an earlier save and continuing from there. I don't know what tripped the bug. I will certainly not be docking at SSP beta in Thuruk's Beard again if I can avoid it!