Game file corruption

gyroscope

Hi, have you ever heard a grown man howling? It goes something like this: howwwwwwwwwwl!

Seriously, I felt like howling a quarter of an hour ago, as my game file has been corrupted; I'm hoping that it's relatively easily repairable but I have the idea that my best bet is to start from scratch, based on it. I have been making backups, except...not lately.

I know exactly what I did to cause the corruption which involved a level screen with no graphics; nothing. I quit without saving and opened the file again, but must have saved at some point, as this time, the HUD stuff was missing, and despite this, worked still as if they'd all been made 0 Alpha, andall of the level graphics were back. I quit again to think about writing this; opened it yet again, the same thing, this time noticing that the HUD folder had disappeared, and about 3 items only in the Level folder. Both times it crashed shortly after.

What I did and why: I got fed up with dragging new actors into the level and them appearing in the HUD folder, them having to drag them into the Level folder, that I thought that it must obviously be that stuff gets automatically put into the first folder in the Layers list. So I swapped them over....howwwwwwwwwl............

I'm going to have to start afresh as I say, but I think that Gendai should expect a lot of crash reports from me as I duplicate stuff across.

So to all GS game-makers: Warning!! Don't reorder your layers folders!!

:-(

quantumsheep

OUCH!

Some advice:

Always have several iterations of your game.

If you're making changes, however small, save as a new file.

e.g.

gyroscope game 1_1

Do some work... then save as

gyroscope game 1_2

then

gyroscope game 1_3

etc etc.

I can't stress how important this is, and it'll save a lot of howling in future! It's how big game developers do stuff, except they use version tracking software like perforce...

Anyway, best of luck mate...

QS

gyroscope

Such sound advice QS, thank you. I should have kept up that way of working. Why didn't I? Why didn't I? Woe is me!

Actually, really fed up about it of course, though It's taught me a lesson; but hopefully from now on, a corrupted file is never going to be a problem again.

:-)

PS Back up. Good. Back up. Back up, bit more, good...back up.....DON'T BACK UP!! (Photographer posing a subject on a clifftop)!

quantumsheep

Heh

gyroscope

Wow, someone chuckled at one of my jokes, that's new! ;-)

It makes sense what I did now, checking the file over again. Firstly, big mistake to change the order of folders in Layers, as this changes the level order as well, which I didn't/don't want. Doh, doh and double doh. The HUD stuff is hiding under the background picture now, of course.

There's still a bug though in as much as the HUD folder has vanished, and there's literally only 2 items showing in Background folder. This bug has told me off: "you wanna muck up your game? i'll muck it up big time for ya!"

Anyhow, the good news for me is all of the Actors, Graphics, Sounds and perhaps most importantly, the Rules, are all intact. Just got to copy the lot into a fresh file now.

Oh, and back up.

:-)

quantumsheep

gyroscope said:

Oh, and back up.

:-)

Is this far enough?

What about now?

Now?

What a
a
a
a
a
a
r
r
r
r
g
g
g
g
h
h
h
h
<thump>

gyroscope

Double chuckle and a guffaw!!

:-)