I don’t know if it’s happened to everyone yet but does anybody recognise the feeling when your computer has just died/wiped/blowup/doesn’t turn on and you have an almost finished game/midi or anything that has taken hours of time?
Well I’m writing this because I just visited circy.cjb.net and relised it’s happened to him. It reminded me of the time when my bro tried to install an operating program on our PC and windows was gone, so was all my work but more importantly my games!!! I had a bit backed up on CD but that was months in the past. I guess it is good to back up stuff regularly.
Anyways, you can post here about your loss of almost finished games, whether you let them go or made them all over again. Tell us how many hours of work you lost and how you restrained yourself, after the second of relisation, from putting your fist through the monitor.
Heh, I know the feeling well. Especially after doing hours and hours of work with TGF only to have it crash on you.
One example was something I was doing in 2000, I wanted to see if I could make a huge game that would fit on a CD. I put hours and hours into it and it was closed to being finished until THE GAME FILE CORRUPTED THANKS TO A FAILED SAVE DUE TO A BLACKOUT.
my old pcs used to crash and need windows reinstalled on a regular basis (every 4 months or so) by new pc has been ok since ive had it! (well it turns itself off when playing counter strike source sometimes)
but i backup my games every now and then but probably not often enough.
At the moment I have 10 different backups of Zombies Now. Early on, about a year ago, I fell pray to the 'Bad Object' bug of MMF, meaning I lost a lot of work on one build of the game. It was a blessing in disguise though, seeing as the new build is much better.
There was a bug in KNP if anyone ever noticed, sometimes, seemingly randomly, the files would just corrupt for no reason. I think the same also happened sometimes in TGF.
Since I usually do a whole bunch of work on a game then get bored with it, I have a folder with hundreds of megs of games at least 50% finished that I'll probably get around to finishing... one day. If I lost all that I'd be extremely upset. Fortunately, since I don't work on anything but my current project at any given time, my last three backups are more or less identical apart from some of the newer things, which all have a dozen or so backup files on disk, so I'd still lose them in the event of a cataclysm. But I take extra-good care of my machine so I feel pretty safe.
I've installed Windows XP once in three years, the first time I installed XP was the last. When I had 98 I had to reinstall that at least once a month, and ME was just shite.
Some of the best games I've ever worked on were lost to computer problems.
An awesome Spy vs. Spy remake I made was actually finished, and then, in a problem similar to Circy's, was destroyed on the same day I went to back it up. I also made a cool space game that I spent hours upon hours on after being inspired by the Klik game Star Angel that was lost on the day I went to back it up.
It's almost like my computer knows when I'm going to backup my files, and then it shits all over them.
Something like that happened recently. My father tried to move the harddrives between two computers and ended up deleting all the data on them, including some games I spent hours on making. I am getting used to this kind of things.
It happens to me rarely because I always save before I test my games, but this of course doesn't prevent all crashes. And in fact, the two worst losses weren't the fault of TGF or MMF at all.
Well the largest one was when I just got a new computer (well my family did) and I had about 20 or so hours of work invested into games and other projects already. We had a guest visiting who tried to install WinXP on the computer (at that time it had just come out), and my dad told him he didn't want WinXP, so then the installation was cancelled which consequently wiped the entire HD. Luckily I had my 2 finished games backed up on disk.
The other occurence was more strange.. it was kind of like Omega's situation. I was in the middle of saving a game that I had invested about 3 or 4 hours into and the power went out when I was in the middle of saving.
My flashdrive is rubbish (like USB in general in my experience...), if you cough on it or do anything bar leave it on a desk, it corrupts (lucky it has its own hardware level formatting program dealy). My flash mp3 player is much better but very very slow .