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It's story time! So why not release a developer log? Sit back, grab a cuppa, it's a long one.
Last week I mentioned I had some unexpected issues that affected the progress of the game. I also mentioned that backups are important. Well here's some more information about that.
Firstly, some background. Much of my writing is done away from this computer (the one I'm using right now). This is my rendering and scene creation PC, as such It's used for everything. I do, as it happens own a laptop - this allows me to be able to write the scenes and even some script elements whilst I am elsewhere (for example, taking my daughter to her swimming lessons).
Pretty efficient, right? Well, normally yes. The issue with this is the script file tends to get split into multiple versions, since I don't just write one scene at a time - I tend to focus on multiple scenes, not including any edits I make to previous scenes, or hell, edits to previous updates!
You can imagine this starts to become a mess, especially If I have been somewhat prolific in the writing that week. However,
WinMerge is your friend, you load in all the versions, compare them and copy the changes / differences over. Thus, all script files are updated.
This worked really well, until a couple of weeks ago when the script editor I use for Ren'Py (Atom) decided it could no longer read the script files.
"That's fine" I thought, I'll just grab the copy I have from the laptop. Except that didn't work either. I tried creating a new game, and confirming I was able to read those script files, I copied a couple of the script files from the DoR project over. They opened okay, but a lot of code, text was missing, or worse, different scenes had been cut into others. Almost as if someone had gone mad with the cut and paste tool.
Well, fuck.
I know, your all thinking, "surly you backup the game!" And the answer is yes, of course I do. And don't call me Shirly. Every Saturday the game, including all script files and images, video animations and music is backed up onto an external drive. At most, I would lose a week of progress.
All I needed to do was restore the last backup, manually copy over the recent additions I had done to the script and vow never to use WinMerge again. I did do this, eventually. And It's all worked okay, but, dear supporter this was coupled with a bigger and, dare I say, more catastrophic problem that, quite frankly, I was not prepared for.
I currently... no, I
had around 1800 assets installed for Daz. I think it was probably close to 1900, but who's counting. For some still unknown reason, Daz decided that it did not want to play with the asset database anymore.
It would show the files, present me with the nice little images to click on, but when attempting to open the asset it would promptly shit the bed, throw some of that shit at the wall in some vague non-descript error and present me with my desktop.
Not that I'm complaining, That desktop image is a favourite of mine, but I'm sure after the tenth time of being dumped out of Daz, Louise and Kimiko were starting to judge me.
This should be simple, the asset files are still there all 400Gb of them. So just re-install Daz, problem solved.
Problem not solved. But I did get a nice new flavour of error message. I need not go into every detail of what I tried, but nothing could get Daz to look at that database properly, the closest I got was when I removed and reinstalled a couple of test assets - Which led me to believe a complete re-install of all the assets was required.
No. I do not have a backup for the asset database, I don't have the luxury of being able to upload 400Gb to a cloud somewhere (I think if I was to try my ISP would cry).
Both of these issues occurred around the same time, I don't think I can blame WinMerge for the Daz database, I'm unsure what happened, could be the drive itself.
Thankfully a lot of the assets have been purchased from Daz directly, so they can be installed easily enough. the issue is with the more 'adult' assets, they tend to come from other sites, and don't install automatically via Daz's install manager. This normally wouldn't be so much of a problem, I would just grab and install the assets as I load the scene as it tells you if any are missing.
That's fine for 1 or 2, but this entire update is
ALL ADULT SCENES. So, I lost a lot of time - but on the plus side I believe I'm almost done, I'm currently sat at 1280 assets and haven't had any missing asset reports when loading scenes for a while now. I can't help shake the feeling that of those 600-ish that are missing they are ones I wanted to use in the future.
So, all's well that... nah fuck that. I'm pissed. But, It
is working again. I am aware that using Git for the script files can help with version control, but I'm a single Dev working on an indie adult game. The time investment is not worth it. I do have a few ideas for version control going forwards and I won't be using WinMerge again.
As for the database, I'm adding a NAS to the Christmas list, It's not a perfect solution but If I get some backup software to go with it, after the initial backup, I'd only need to run incremental ones and these should be faster. Recovering using the NAS would have been quicker and certainly less stressful.
Well, that's it for this Log. Thanks for reading I'll see you next week.
Cenc
