I’ve discovered something today. I’ve discovered that my work of the last month is, well, gone. The Lazarus Drive is corrupted. Either from just being old, or it was somehow twisted by its visit with the Vista OS. Either way, it’s cooked. I could probably reformat it and have a working drive, but really, that was never the point.
So, let’s take stock of what it is that I’ve lost. The screen cap function, gone. The Stitch function that never quite worked right, also gone. The AI pathfinding Algorithms, unfortunately gone also. The first two are tools, they don’t have to work great, just good enough. They’re easily rebuilt. The Pathfinding however, was on its merry way to being finished workable game code. The difference? One is something that only the developer will ever see, the other has to work every time. It has to be bullet proof and free of bugs. That, of course, is a lot harder. Let me put it another way, if a game was released in the same state as the tools used to make it, people would claim it is buggy and it sucks.
So, yeah, that’s going to take a few days to get back to a state that it was. At the very least, I know how it works (worked) so I should be able to put it back together a lot faster than it took me to put it together the first time.
-In not-news I’ve discovered the message boards at Gamasutra are especially fun if you disagree with most of the people there. I’ve recently both defended Crunch as a means to an end (but damned Grinding) and argued in a forum that is all art people and designers, that games are not art. Of course, saying that in a forum like Gamasutra, full of industry types is like saying kittens are ugly and puppies are made for kicking. At least my Sugar Bear icon is there with each post. His sweater clad smirk giving my thoughts additional, well, smugness.
I have noticed something though, and this is why I feel free to share an opinion, nobody has ever said that I’m wrong. They disagree, they offer alternatives, but they never say that I don’t know what I’m talking about and they seem to respect my opinion. I wish XBOX Live were so polite. Who knew? You can have an intelligent conversation with people on internet.
EDIT: Son of a bitch. It’s gone. The Object Code is gone. The code that puts cute animated shit on the screen is history. Sayonara. No little candles, no adorable little torches. God damn everything. The newest shiniest thing. Forget the AI, it was only halfway done. The Object code was finished. Why? Why is it gone? What sin did it commit? I want it back. I…it…maybe I…maybe indeed. I might have it somewhere. I really, really do not what to recode the most complex bit of syntax in the library.