- Aug 3, 2021
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But at least he good at that. Like, really, really good. If there's a world championship in being beaten up he would win by a large margin.
- Jan 19, 2020
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But at least he good at that. Like, really, really good. If there's a world championship in being beaten up he would win by a large margin.
- Nov 19, 2017
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Boys I don't think we will see another about year or two. dev lost is HDD
I think this happened to me before. It'll probably be fine. I remember thinking that some files were out of place when I transferred them over but everything was still intact. I guess the lesson here is to backup EVERYTHING to a separate hard drive when working on a project.Boys I don't think we will see another about year or two. dev lost is HDD
Still, if this sets him back then that would suck big time. Based on his progress report from July, it already sounded like we weren't going to get an update for a while even though it'd already been around 7 months since his last one.
- Nov 20, 2018
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Yep, here's the full update:Boys I don't think we will see another about year or two. dev lost is HDD
2 HOURS AGO
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I wish I was joking.
Recently, my PC has started to show signs of poor health. That has manifested a couple times through blue screens. In the past few days, however, they got more frequent, until I started getting one every single day for the past four days. I even (completely in vain) created a restoration point in case anything bad happened. Today, while I was working on the new art for MW for the Steam release and
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, my computer just froze. Mouse was working fine, but little by little, everything stopped receiving commands. It was like a living organism that was slowly losing bodily function. It was odd and had never happened before. "CPU acting up again", I thought and just forced a shutdown. Bear in mind, that was barely five minutes after getting my daily blue screen. PC was still starting up their piles upon piles of Microsoft bloatware and game launchers. When I turned it back on, I was met with an "automatic repair loop".Further inspection revealed to me that my Windows installation got corrupted, and so did my user data. My files in that HDD look fine, mostly, but there's no way to tell for sure. Since my W10 installation is gone, so is my restoration point. It's like climbing a wall, hooking yourself to it, but when you fall, so does the wall. Now I'm stuck here trying to figure out what to do to get my PC back in working condition. Fortunately, I have my portable HDD which I use to transfer work files between my laptop and my PC. Inside, I have every 3d file I need to work, plus, I have an extra 2 TB HDD which I bought for the sole purpose of storing my 3d files. So, I can say for sure none of that was lost. Because of that, I'm able to barely keep it together. Characters like Chloe and Fiona are heavily custom, so there's no way in hell I can risk losing them, hence, why I keep copies of them in three different places. I've been through all this "losing my files" bullshit once before and I'm absolutely not going through it again.
However, I can't be 100% sure nothing important is lost or corrupted. I have an extra 500 GB HDD my brother gave me two years ago that was just sitting in my wardrobe wrapped in paper and tape for safekeeping. I installed a fresh version of Windows 10 in it and now I'm sitting here doing damage control. While digging through my files in my main drive, I happened to find all of my MW script files just sitting in there.
That sent chills running down my spine.
Among them, was the code for my gallery and short story system I spent the past six months planning and one week actually making. I couldn't help but shout "WHY THE FUCK IS THIS HERE???" for the whole neighborhood to hear. I keep all of my work-related things in my 2 TB HDD, but I don't know what else I could've left in my main one.
I'll be doing damage control before trying to reinstall my Windows and work-related stuff like DAZ Studio or Ren'Py again. On top of that, whatever caused all of this might decide to strike back. I don't know if my main HDD is finally retiring or if the blame lies somewhere else.
My apartment is just where my body lives, but my PC is my real home. And now that home has been hit with a big ass hurricane. So, to conclude this odyssey of fuck: I'm pretty bummed out, not gonna lie. I might have lost every single one of my save games, reference pictures, some of the 3d animations I made in Cascadeur (I was really looking forward to showing you guys those), among other things I can't really remember right now. There's no way to know how much of a setback this whole situation is going to be. Rendering, compiling, and post work have been halted completely as I need my laptop to do things like creating a bootable drive and writing posts like this one. I also can't use my main PC. I want to somehow fix this whole thing and go back to working normally and that's what I'll try to do.
I'll keep you guys posted if anything changes or if all this ends up just being a scare. One can hope.
Rule of thumbs:
Have a dedicated drive for the OS only.
Then have a couple of drives to separate things (ex: one for games, one for data, and one for stuff you don't give a crap about.)
And then have a drive or two, for backups.
That way, if your OS drive dies, you can reinstall/swap the drive only loosing your installed software and OS.
If you loose your actual data, your backup should be able to recover that just fine.
Have a dedicated drive for the OS only.
Then have a couple of drives to separate things (ex: one for games, one for data, and one for stuff you don't give a crap about.)
And then have a drive or two, for backups.
That way, if your OS drive dies, you can reinstall/swap the drive only loosing your installed software and OS.
If you loose your actual data, your backup should be able to recover that just fine.
if only OS is corrupted on the drive. buy one of the external hdd readers. install fresh os with new drive in pc and read corrupted os drive externally.
I don't want to pretend to be an expert on this but it seems like that's what he did already or he at least did something similar. I remember having to do this before too after my hard drive failed on one of my old computers.
I think he's worried that some data has been corrupted after taking a look at it and seeing that some files weren't in their correct places.
Well, hindsight's 20/20. Although ... it did seem like he had plenty of warning signs/tools to at least prepare for this and realize it was going to happen eventually. Multiple BSODs and even another drive laying around. I would've freaked out after the first one and stopped everything to start looking for ways to keep my data.
- Mar 23, 2019
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I don't really get it. The entire game, all the renders, and all the development information, test videos, whatever, has to be no more than a few 100 GB. External hard drives are around $50 for a terrabyte. And you can even use a USB flash drive in a pinch (not the best, but works).
If you are a developer sinking hundreds and probably thousands of hours on your creative work, for profit, why wouldn't you take a few $50 worth of your monthly donations, and have like 3 backups. Keep one plugged in and backup every day with a batch file, or Windows backup task, and then back up the other 2 once per week. Or pick one of the paid backup softwares out there you can find with a 2 minute google search, for like $30, and just click in the directories you want, and setup incremental mirrored backups.
Then, pick a cloud provider and upload a 4th backup, for around $5 a month max. It will backup every night.
Your OS doesn't matter. If your Windows machine gets borked, just download Windows for free from microsoft, reinstall, and then copy back your data directory from your usb drive or the nightly cloud backup.
It's not like we are in 2005, where storage was very expensive, and cloud storage really didn't exist at a reasonable price.
I don't understand how someone knowledgeable enough about computers to develop a game, where they have to render, code, and create a file structure, can't drag and drop a few directories every day or at least once a week, and/or write a .batch file to backup their stuff.
I get it if you are a casual computer user that just uses your PC for facebook or instagram and browsing the web, and doesn't really know about files and directories and never heard of a batch file. But a game developer, with a Patreon account, who codes, for money? I don't see how it is possible that they wouldn't have a few backups.
If you are a developer sinking hundreds and probably thousands of hours on your creative work, for profit, why wouldn't you take a few $50 worth of your monthly donations, and have like 3 backups. Keep one plugged in and backup every day with a batch file, or Windows backup task, and then back up the other 2 once per week. Or pick one of the paid backup softwares out there you can find with a 2 minute google search, for like $30, and just click in the directories you want, and setup incremental mirrored backups.
Then, pick a cloud provider and upload a 4th backup, for around $5 a month max. It will backup every night.
Your OS doesn't matter. If your Windows machine gets borked, just download Windows for free from microsoft, reinstall, and then copy back your data directory from your usb drive or the nightly cloud backup.
It's not like we are in 2005, where storage was very expensive, and cloud storage really didn't exist at a reasonable price.
I don't understand how someone knowledgeable enough about computers to develop a game, where they have to render, code, and create a file structure, can't drag and drop a few directories every day or at least once a week, and/or write a .batch file to backup their stuff.
I get it if you are a casual computer user that just uses your PC for facebook or instagram and browsing the web, and doesn't really know about files and directories and never heard of a batch file. But a game developer, with a Patreon account, who codes, for money? I don't see how it is possible that they wouldn't have a few backups.
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- Apr 28, 2020
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there are two types of people, those who didn't lose any important files yet and those who do backups
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15 MINUTES AGO
After hours of backup and (failed) recovery, one huge mess up on my part, and 700 gigs of corrupted data later, I have my PC all ready to go. I backed up whatever I could, but because of one stupid mistake (and a shitty design choice on Microsoft's part), I lost everything in my main HDD. I also lost a huge chunk of my user data since, for some reason, only the 'local' folder of my 'AppData' folder got copied over. As far as those 700 GB of data go, I can do nothing but hope they were made of games and be less of a hoarder next time.
-My Cascadeur animations were lost.
I was stressed out and doing some cleanup in my 'Documents' folder so I could back up only the most important stuff and ended up deleting everything that wasn't inside a folder. Which means my Cascadeur animations I dedicated dozens of hours to. I'm still a little sad I lost the data, but I still have the experience. I learned a lot of new different motions and techniques I can not only apply to Unreal Engine games (which is what I intended) but to DAZ animations, too. Like changing keyframe interpolation, for example. I discovered that a lot of the "jittering" that happened in my animations was due to me using the wrong kind of interpolation for certain body parts, causing them to move at different speeds. Bad news is that I lost around 8 or 9 animations. Good news is that I can make new and better ones next time.
-My entire "Local Disk C:", was lost.
I had years of programs and tools for every kind of problem one can find on a computer. They're all lost now.
It's hard for me to convince myself that "oh, it was all made of games" when I look at my secondary drive and see I have most of my Steam games inside, including my 150+ gigs of modded Skyrim and modded Fallout 4. Right now I feel like I'm in a horror movie just waiting for the jumpscare. Just waiting to look for that one important thing I needed and realize that "oh... that was lost too".
I'm stunned. I guess that's the right word. I know exactly what I need to do now to keep the ball rolling, but right now I just feel kinda drugged up. I don't know how to explain it. It's a sour feeling reaching for my bookmarked stuff and realizing these ones are from December 2022, or opening anything on my main PC and realizing I don't have .Net Framework installed. I'm too used to having everything on my computer run like clockwork, and for me to have all the tools I need and know where it all is. Hopefully, I'll get myself back into form and work on MW still today. I want to release the next update this month, after all.
At the end of the day, I can't complain much. My PC's been needing this cleanup for years.
Still here.
he doesn't have a lot of patrons so he doesn't have a lot of spare money either i'd reckon.
Man, he doesn't have that much to even replace chair that chair replacement becomes one of the update.
I do think it's extremely bad practice to ignore multiple BSOD and not have backups.
Hey, guys! Just to give everybody a quick update (dunno how up-to-date everybody is with my Discord and Patreon, and I just don't post here as often as I should).
All my 3D and Ren'Py things are safe. I bought a 2 TB HDD (after Chapter 3.3, I think?) for exactly this reason, and I have another 2 TB external drive. The loss was more personal than anything and I had to spend a couple days getting my main PC back to working condition. Whether I'll be able to keep the same rhythm I had a week ago... well, I don't know. But I'll try my hardest. PC is okay after everything -- human behind it is not so ok with losing 700 GB of data, but we keep at it regardless. Thank you all for your patience.
All my 3D and Ren'Py things are safe. I bought a 2 TB HDD (after Chapter 3.3, I think?) for exactly this reason, and I have another 2 TB external drive. The loss was more personal than anything and I had to spend a couple days getting my main PC back to working condition. Whether I'll be able to keep the same rhythm I had a week ago... well, I don't know. But I'll try my hardest. PC is okay after everything -- human behind it is not so ok with losing 700 GB of data, but we keep at it regardless. Thank you all for your patience.
- Mar 23, 2019
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This is good news, at least that you didn't lose your development work. Sorry you lost a lot of your applications, but hopefully for most of them, you can google them and reinstall them.
We've all been there, when a hard drive fails or an OS won't boot, and we have that feeling of a cold chill wondering what we might have lost. In the "old" days, I'd have a hard drive fail about once every year or two, sometimes more. I got in the habit of making good backups of anything creative or that can't be redownloaded.
I recommend cloud backups you can run nightly. It costs less than $5 a month for over a terrabyte. And take a snapshot image of your main drive, or better yet, like Squishyderpy said, install your applications on a different drive or partition to the main OS, and back that up along with your data. Also, keep the original install files so you can reinstall the applications if you need to reinstall the OS, since simply copying them back often won't work for complex applications.
Did you ever find out the cause or was it just the case of an old hard drive?
Also, yo!!! I just found your game a couple of months ago. This shit is fucking amazing! I know it might sound like empty praise if I'm not on Patreon but I just wanted to tell you that I was so impressed with this game, it immediately went into my top 5 and I even played it twice in a row.
That version of Windows was already pretty damaged from so many years of usage and registry messarounds. And my hard drive had gone a good six years without any sort of cleanup. I was just begging for this to happen.
Back when I was still working on Chapter 4, those final four months were hellish. The long development time was taking its toll on me, and I thought I'd never see it completed. Along with it, all of my goals, dreams, and projects that rely on MW being financially successful would never see the light of day. MW wasn't making enough to even pay for itself at that point (understandably so), and I was getting weaker both physically from neglecting my own health, and psychologically. Knowing people liked what I did made it all much easier. It helped me focus on my goals and served as a reminder of why I really do this. It still does. So no, I don't see it as empty praise at all. It means a lot.
Dude, you got this. Just keep trucking and you're going to break out. It's too good to not get traction. It's also why I put it in my fan sig with the link. I want more people to know about it.
As a side note, would you mind if I proofread it a little? I like it as it is but I'd want to do a little bit to make replays better. I just don't know how you'd feel about that since I know devs are touchy about people touching their games.
if there's one thing I'd like to see, is to see you post more often on your patreon
some devs i patron post regular updates, weekly, or biweekly
I wouldn't mind it at all! Help is always appreciated. For the upcoming update, however, I think every bug or overlooked part of my script that needed fixing has already been flagged on my Discord. There's not much else to do for 4.1. Some help on 5.0 would be very welcome, though.
Yeah, people have been telling me that for years. I'm not very good with social media in general. With Patreon specifically, I only take advantage of its infrastructure when I have actual news or insight to offer on the development process, which doesn't happen too often. Still, I'm always trying to outdo myself, so this could always change in the future.
- Jul 10, 2017
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This game escalated the action scenes to record highs.
There were astounding home wrecking going on in the house of the phasing boy.
Then there was the special mission of saving kids off traffickers, that was awesome.
Pretty exciting sitting here clapping these words to bring about that bigger better update
to top even the most outlandish mission impossible/fast 11 action sequence
in this same game.
Here is hope for this action game to bloom into the blockbuster it has been gearing for.
There were astounding home wrecking going on in the house of the phasing boy.
Then there was the special mission of saving kids off traffickers, that was awesome.
Pretty exciting sitting here clapping these words to bring about that bigger better update
to top even the most outlandish mission impossible/fast 11 action sequence
in this same game.
Here is hope for this action game to bloom into the blockbuster it has been gearing for.
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