I'm reopening this thread as a problem topic urging people to look into this issue and / or reply with some kind of solution to this problem.

The problem:
Some hostages and terrorists, except for their symbol on the map, don't appear in certain missions. This bug makes it impossible to advance as you have to collect all hostages or kill all terrorists.

Does anyone have any idea what's causing this and can you offer a solution for it?

More info regarding the problem in this thread.

I have an XP machine with DirectX 9 installed.

Thanks.

I remember hearing in a LP I watched a while back that the problem is a bug with the game engine - effectively, the hostages/terrorists have spawned, and have done so inside the level geometry, effectively making them stuck out of sight with no way to reach them, kill them, or do anything else to them. The only way to get around it that I've heard of us to use cheats Open the chat menu, type debugkeys, then hit F12 - that is the level skip button.

Thanks! Too bad that it renders the whole level unplayable... Here's hoping GOG will fix it... someday...

I've experienced the "invisible hostage" problem in the first mission and I think I've found the origin of the problem.

Looking into the "data" folder of the GOG install of Rainbow Six, there are 6168 files.

However, when I look into the "data" folder for a CD-install of Rainbow Six, there are 6175 files.

The GOG install is missing 7 files in the data folder!

Just to confirm, I replaced the "data" folder of the GOG install with its counterpart from the CD-install and, yep, the "invisible hostage" in the first mission is visible (and rescuable) now.

Has anyone sent this to support? If this is an actual solution then support needs to know so they can fix it. They don't trawl the forums for problems/solutions.

Just bought this game on GOG because I wanted a version of the game to run under Windows 8. Then I run into THIS bug. Wow. Plus the framerate is steppy as hell, the music is constantly glitching and playing over itself. This is depressing.

Taken from PCGamingWiki:

1. Go to <path-to-game>\data\mission and open the specific mission victory conditions text file with a text editor (ex. Notepad).
The text files will include the mission number and the difficulty in the name (for this fix, look for the VicCondM5Med.txt file)

In the file, find the following text block:

// Condition 0: Rescue the hostages
HUMAN_CLASS_CONDITION HOSTAGES
DESCRIPTION VC_GEN_RESCUE_ALL_HOSTAGES
GOAL_TYPE PRIMARY_GOAL
HAS_REACHED_EXTRACTION_ZONE 1
NUMBER ALL
RESULT SUCCESS

3. Change the "NUMBER ALL" portion to "NUMBER 4"
4. Save the changes and launch the game.

Note that for this fix, Mission 5 on medium difficulty will allow the mission to be completed with the 4 hostages rendered. To apply the fix to other difficulty levels, modify the respective text files.