I can find no evidence that the last three days of programming haven’t all occurred inside my head. I have extremely distinct memories of adding in code to make it so that the enemies would take damage and bounce off of fire objects, and I remember planning on adding an “on fire” animation to the list of things to do. I can distinctly remember the issues I had troubleshooting it when it didn’t work, and calling it all good when I finally got it, because it was getting close to night time and I’d work on the rest the next day. And the next day, when I decided it was time to start working on a parallax scrolling background to go in front of the sky, and spending forever making one and the after hours programming it in so it looked good, realizing that I’d forgotten to shade it like I did the sky-background to show nighttime, and then just dragging it out of the field of view until I could fix it.
When I brought my files to work yesterday to work on them, I thought I’d just forgotten to drag the folder onto the thumb drive, since I was operating off of my “last version.” But when I got home, I couldn’t find anything to show that I’d ever done any work at all.
At first I thought maybe I’d deleted the other files and overwritten them with the ones from the thumb drive (essentially reverting to my last version), which is still a possibility, except that whenever I do that, I actually delete them, not just overwrite them. And there was nothing in the recycle bin from my game that was dated since December 16th.
The power also went out a few days ago, and I thought that maybe I’d left everything up without saving and just lost my progress. But Torque won’t actually compile and run anything without saving, so there was no way I could have tested everything without saving my progress. I can’t imagine that windows would have done any restore-point nonsense without informing me of it when I turned my computer back on.
When I brought my files to work yesterday to work on them, I thought I’d just forgotten to drag the folder onto the thumb drive, since I was operating off of my “last version.” But when I got home, I couldn’t find anything to show that I’d ever done any work at all.
At first I thought maybe I’d deleted the other files and overwritten them with the ones from the thumb drive (essentially reverting to my last version), which is still a possibility, except that whenever I do that, I actually delete them, not just overwrite them. And there was nothing in the recycle bin from my game that was dated since December 16th.
The power also went out a few days ago, and I thought that maybe I’d left everything up without saving and just lost my progress. But Torque won’t actually compile and run anything without saving, so there was no way I could have tested everything without saving my progress. I can’t imagine that windows would have done any restore-point nonsense without informing me of it when I turned my computer back on.
The only other option is that I made the whole thing up. I’ve been pretty sick the last week or so; especially over the last three days. I’ve been going through dayquil like it was soda, and I’ve been so cold lately, I’m pretty sure I have at least a minor fever. When I got home from work today, my last memory before waking up curled in a ball on the bed was getting ready to go and take out the recycling- when I woke up, the recycling was still here, but I was dressed and ready to go, and it was two hours later.
But I wouldn’t have just lost time, I’d’ve completely fabricated ridiculously intricate memories of conceptualizing, programming, testing, troubleshooting, and finishing two major pieces of code.
I think I’m going crazy.
Hey bud. Check out Git if you haven’t already. Or some other type of version control. It’s saved my butt on a few occasions already. Also, there’s a site with free private repositories at bitbucket.org. Might help prevent things like this. Dropbox would work too I guess. Glad to see so much progress man. Hope things are going well in the world for you.
I just created a dropbox account recently; I think I’m going to switch over to using that until I get the new site set up for good. Once that’s up, I’ll probably just host the files for download straight from the site.
I’m really, really bad about storing version of my work somewhere. I think the biggest problem is that it’s hard to see a transition from version x to version x+1. It’s just sort of a giant work in progress, and unless I can come up with a way to automatically do a midnight backup or something (which is probably doable, looking at some of those things you mentioned. I’ll have to look into it harder) I’m going to have to rely on my usual Polish scatterbrain-edness.
Also, it’s kind of a morale booster to know that more than two people ever look at this site. I saw your comments from way back on deployment, but I figured you’d given up on it since then. Thanks for keeping up!
No problem. Something I do with my ruby on rails programming that I do now, with every user story I do another git commit (save basically if you’re not familiar with Git). So if I list a feature that “An admin can edit user info through X page”, when I finish that feature I will do another commit. It seems to me you could do something similar with the elements you’d like to add to your game. Think I’ll be starting a blog like this soon too actually. Seems a nice way to think through things you’re doing and even get a little feedback here and there. Keep it up man!