Recover a project from the viewer

steve86

Hey guys.

Today my mac died on me and with the mac my gs project that I have been working on for 4 months. I did had a backup on an external HD but I had a really bad surge on my home last night and the external HD is also fried. I do however have a preview of my game on the gs viewer and I was hoping someone can give me some good news here and tell me if its posible to recover my gamesalad project from the viewer?

ANY help will be very much appreciated.

Thank you in advance

A sad steve

JeffreyShimane

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think you can extract a GS project file from a game in the GS viewer.

However, your Mac could be dead for a number of reasons that do not involve your hard drive so your data might still be recoverable. You could buy a relatively cheap external hard drive case, pull the hard drive out of your Mac, and put it into the external hard drive case to see if your data is still there.

- Jeff

steve86

First thing I did was go to a local computer repair shop and they tried to install the HD on another computer and even an external enclosure and couldn't get it to work.

thanks for your suggestion thou

xarmian

Actually Steve, there is a magical way if your iPhone is jailbroken. You will need to be comfortable with the terminal (or use a file viewing program on your iphone or computer). I use the terminal and don't know what good programs are out there, so I use SSH and terminal. You may also be able to find this stuff in the backup that iTunes makes of your iphone application data but I don't know. Here are my steps:

1. SSH into your iPhone
2. Go to /var/mobile/Applications
3. Type:

find . -name "GameSalad Viewer.app"

This will help you find the GameSalad Viewer app folder. go into this folder, in my case the folder was:

cd B5F26A8F-E118-4E09-8478-AB55D66C35DA

Then go into the Documents folder. This is where the application is stored:

cd Documents

then go into saved_games:

cd saved_games

Here you'll see a folder for each game that is stored inside GSViewer. Go into that folder:

cd MyGameFolder

Inside here is your .gameproj folder, called game.gameproj. Transfer that folder to your computer.

Now comes the caveat. The images are in a png format for the iPhone, which does not show up on the Mac. The images need to be converted to a Mac-readable format. A quick google search gave me this result, but there are lots of results out there and I can't vouch for any of them including this one:

http://www.ifans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8565

The other option is, if you still have the art assets, just copy them back in to your project. After all this you should have your gameproj back.

JeffreyShimane

That's awesome info, xarmian! Learn something new every day on these forums...

- Jeff

cesar_m_romero

Wow, Xarmian's answer is probably better (at least way more informed than my own...) but I would advise mounting your HDD (whether you do it externally or internally) and use Disk Warrior on it.

Disk Warrior saved my life! I was using a customer's HDD and one of my employees fried it (with ALL their corporate backup in it!!!). DW recovered every single byte.

It's not cheap... $99 USD. But for 4 months of work I believe is worth it! Maybe they have a demo... I don't really know.

DreamLab

If you were logged into gamesalad, you could always try the "open recent" tab and see if its there. Don't know if it will work.

StoneDrip

next time if you're creating your project, you can try dropbox. It's a tool that let you save your files on their server, and you can view your file anywhere! From your mac, pc or iphone!! so if your mac broke down, your file will still be saved securely on their server.