I pulled an all-nighter last night and pretty much finished up my first foundry mission
Thought it was a pretty easy process overall and a lot of fun. Anyway, here goes my problem/question:

As I said I'm just about done with my mission. It should be in a playable state and I just wanted to play through it once from beginning to end to iron out the small issues (distances, mob difficulty etc.) before publishing it.

Most of the time I used the "Play Map" button (at the top of the Maps tab) to test the various parts of the mission, just so I didn't have to start in sector space, go to the beginning of the mission and so on. It worked fine for me. I only used the "Play Mission" button at the top of the Story tab at the very beginning of my mission creation, because I didn't know the "Play Map" button existed and that it was easier to just use that one.

Anyways, just now when I wanted to play through the entire mission, I used the Play Mission button that makes you start in sector space. And that's where the problems start: the mission starts with an objective somewhere towards the end of the quest (all the ones prior to it being marked complete) and when I enter the mission, I get many text pop ups one after another relating to different objectives in the mission, and they don't follow the story as laid out in the Story tab in the editor. I'm rather confused on this, I've been trying all kinds of things now and nothing worked. Now I'm attempting to stay logged out of the game for 15 minutes in a last effort to make it work, but I fear it won't.

But something else just came to my mind: are you perhaps not allowed to use one map multiple times?

Thing is this: my space map has two planets. I start the mission on the space map, beam down to the first planet, beam back up to the space map, go to the other planet, beam down to the other planet, and beam back up to the space map, then end the mission.

So could it be that I have to use a new space map every time I beam back to it? I could just duplicate the space map two times (meaning I have three versions of it), delete the stuff not needed in the respective objectives, and every time I spawn in the space map, I use a different one, i.e. enter the mission in map SPACE #1, beam down to planet, beam up to SPACE #2, beam down to other planet, beam up to SPACE #3.
Does that make sense? And could my usage of one instance of this space map be the problem I'm experiencing here?
If so, the Foundry editor should really prohibit you from placing more than one spawn point or something like that.

i have found this irritating so i was glad when they allowed multiple map names the same. i just plant everything on the map i need then duplicate it trying to not go over the 10 map limit. hitting this limit will cause serious problems for your mission though

I tried to use 1 space map twice as well and it didn't pan out. Something was making the place markers and timing off somehow but when I just duplicated the map and separated the two sequences that happened on the same map it worked.

There's definitely something wonky with the Foundry tools at the moment I had to re-import my mission twice to "reset" or re-establish my objectives, triggers, etc.

Interesting. Well I'll go duplicate my space map right now then and report back if it works or not. If that does fix it I think we should post a bug report that using one map multiple times makes the mission buggy. The editor should at least display a warning of some sort about that, if not prohibit it altogether.

That's exactly what it is, with the current state of Foundry tech, you cant use the same instance more than once, unless you want to keep entering on the same spawn point. You would have to dupilcate the map, name it as SPACE #2 as u said, then go from SPACE#1 to PLANET to SPACE#2 with the updated spawn point

Yup, that's what I did. Worked fine - Steve Jobs would say it's magical.

I'm posting about this on the bug forums...