Development on Pause

[blueteak]

As many of you may know, last week my hard drive that had all of the source files for this game crashed, reformatted itself, then failed completely.

Over the week I have spent tens of hours attempting to recover it. The data is still there, but the HD can take hours to respond to simple functions (like opening a folder) and ejects itself often. (This is all after I took it to a PC repair shop and they said that the HD was just decoration at this point...). So while I am hopeful that I will be able to get the data back eventually, the process is both time consuming and incredibly frustrating .

I DO have another copy on a flash drive, from when I was porting the game over to iOS. The problem is that it is a very old version (Pre-lobby, jump physics still broken, no UI for tag or hunt, etc). So I want to exhaust every recovery option before I turn to rebuilding what I have lost.

Also - I go back to school tomorrow (Bio-medical Engineering at Vanderbilt University) which means I'll be a bit tied up at the beginning of the year getting back into the flow of school work. And won't has as much time as I do now, to both work on the game and try more recovery options.

Therefor I am letting you all know that there won't be a game update for at least another week or two. If I somehow manage to recover the data, I'll be sure to create another post to let everyone know. For now though you'll have to just live with the occasional double-jump and bouncy ice.

I will still be involved with the forums (not letting Pro-Marbler or Maingi beat my Hangman streaks...) just won't be updating this blog too often until I have the data back or begin working on rebuilding the game from my older version.

[Perishingflames]

Good luck on the hard drive recovery. And I thought for sure you would be a CS major with all that development you've been doing this summer on your MB game.

[blueteak]

Was thinking about a CS minor, but all the math....

Done a bit of BME programming as well :
(I work at the Laser Lab at my university researching stimulation with nerves and brain function)

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/102413512/laserpuzzle/laserpuzzle.html

[ProMarbler]

Sorry about your loss. Hard drives seem very wimpy these days. It seemed rather cool and promising for what you had with it.

I'm just curious, but what OS were you using at the time? I've also found that head crashes are really a to fix, especially if it can't recover from the error. I've heard that you can try to freeze it in a well-sealed bag if the disk platters are striking the R/W head, contracting it so that it'll be able to spin, but I've never tried it, and I'm uncertain if it'll work at all. It wouldn't if the head clicks immediately.

When my Mac's HD decided to corrupt, with a very ominous "Invalid Sibling Link" when I tried to repair it, it took brutal work and effort to get it running again. Right around when I did that check, it took a very long time to do such actions as opening certain folders and apps. Apparently the filesystem had corrupted itself in such a way that no available tool could fix it, and I had to resort to a Erase, Format, and Install. A reformat seemed to correct some bad sectors and fix the structure, and it worked fine (after copying the few, semi-important files that were still on there, via the Terminal app).
But another HD of a laptop wasn't so lucky, and experienced steadily increasing bad sectors, so that it was unrecoverable (Wouldn't even mount.). It seems very likely, based on the extend of the slow response (hours, vs a minute or two) that your drive is a very big loss. Unless you have around $2000 available to spend at a good HD recovery center, that would open the HD itself in a special environment and recover data with highly advanced techniques, then it could be a viable option of data recovery.

Is it possible to get a copy from another user's browser cache, and have it that way? Just a thought, you might get a working version (but I'd doubt there would be source code).

Good luck.

[Perishingflames]

Is it that many more classes? At my school CS major requires just diffeq/mulltivariable, linear algebra, and a stat class.

Awesome simulation thing. What are the applications for that?

[blueteak]

@pro Marbler: I was running Windows 7, but after no recovery options were getting even close with it (Even booted from a linux USB) I switched to trying to recover with my mac using it as an external HD, which is getting much better results (though not enough...). I am quite reluctant to spend lots of money on recovery because in reality I lost very little other than the game.

@pf: Ya, there are a number of computer-math classes I would need to take.

The laser simulation is grounded in physics (you may have noticed that energy decreases based on the length of the ray path) and I'm working on creating an "Intro to lasers" application as an educational tool. (Also prototyping laser system arrays would be possible)