manyeyedhydra
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HoHH ver0.024 Delayed Because of Bad Software Crash
🕑 Added 2021-09-30 15:01:10 +0000 UTCRotten news, as the title above.
I was working on finishing off Osculia's repeat visit scenario this morning (the last thing before final testing) when my laptop crashed. I rebooted expecting to find I'd lost a couple of hours work at the most, only to find the story (aka what Twine calls projects) not there when I started it up again. After some panicky googling to find where the local autosaves are stored, I found it, only to find that file had somehow become corrupted and Twine wouldn't load it (nor would notepad for me to at least try and retrieve the raw .html code).
Cue much beating of fists and screaming at the sky.
On the positive side, I archive and backup to an external hard drive at the beginning of every month.
On the negative side, having the project crash and the file corrupt on the very last day of the month is the worst possible day for this to happen.
This is also one of the worst months it could happen given all the various changes I've implemented (which are now lost).
Suffice to say, I did not spend this morning in a good place.
But it's happened, so the only thing to do is to pick myself up, dust myself off and work out how to retrieve the situation.
I was able to find an automated backup from the 9th September. That looks to have been made midway through the .isSingular attribute being added to gifts to resolve 'it/them' usage in harlot scenarios. I worked back through the harlots until all of them were updated, so that is now the cut off point of where I was up to.
I reckon the damage is I've lost the last 3 weeks of work. Which sounds horrible, but should be clarified as 3 weeks of implementation work in Twine.
Raw text is stored in word .docs, so that hasn't been lost.
Also, because it was fiddly and the Twine editor runs fairly slowly because of the size of the project, the revamped selection algorithm was typed up in notepad first, so I still have that.
However, I have lost:
Pel-V Gnoi's implementation.
Osculia's repeat visit implementation.
QoL change to skip The Madam's mulligan token explanation.
The revamped transition to Club Activities that allows the Madam skip and for the Barman to give more clues in later rounds.
Reorganisation of harlot factions/round ranges.
QoL change to allow player to use a mulligan token to buy charm of choice.
All in all, I estimate it's probably going to take 1 to 2 weeks to put all of that back in. So, I'm feeling fairly gutted at the moment.
Literotica's Halloween short story competition starts on the 1st Oct. Originally, I was thinking of putting out ver0.024 and then spending the 1st week of October finishing off a story I've had on the side for a while. Part of me wants to do that to take my mind off this. Part of me thinks if you fall off the horse, you should get right back on, and the best thing I can do for the next week or two is to just grit my teeth and put the lost changes back in and get the project back on track again.
For obvious reasons, I won't be putting out ver0.024 later today. I feel really bad about that. I've had a year of fairly consistently putting out a new release at the end of the month, and the month where I have an influx of new patrons to take me above 400 is the one where my computer punks out and eats about 3 weeks of work. These things happen, unfortunately.
I didn't know the Twine editor handled crashes so badly. Now I'm aware of this, you can be sure I'll be making manual archive saves a lot more frequently!
To at least give you something, I've attached the raw scripts of the harlots that would have appeared for this release (Pel-V Gnoi and Osculia's new repeat visit scene).
I'd already decided to cut the boobfairy because of time concerns - she's still in progress. This might not be a bad thing. As with Osculia, her scenario leads directly on to a follow-up scenario and it might be best to put both the boobfairy and her larger 'friend' in the same release.
It's frustrating, as up until this happened, September felt like a really good month.
Once again, apologies. I'll try to get everything back on track (and get that public release out) ASAP.
Comments
Many-Eyed Hydra
Yup, the change I was most concerned about was the transition from the 1st harlot presentation to the club activities round. That was fiddly to write the first time as it's a tangle of different pathways running through each other. Thankfully, I still had my notes and I think I was able to re-implement that yesterday. Just need to test it this morning. After that, everything else is fairly straightforward.
Can I just add that despite losing all that work, anything you learned about coding or tricks are still with you. Your ideas for stories etc so despite losing a month's work it should mean you have a good start and don't need to learn them again. I've been through similar scenarios over the years losing irreplaceable photos and stuff and a few years ago invested in a backup server with comprehensive RAID. Its not foolproof, but its been a very worthwhile investment
Many-Eyed Hydra
It's something I'm thinking of holding back as a potential higher tier reward. I was going to go over that this month, but trying to set up higher reward tiers after a crash wiped out a regular monthly release is a little awkward. I'll get caught up again in October and look to raise discussion on additional tiers in November.
Many-Eyed Hydra
Manually archive saving after every feature addition should probably fix it. I backup at the start of every month and keep an up-to-date changelog. I got caught out by not realising a crash was going to render the project file unusable and it happened on the most damaging day it could happen. Unfortunate, but now I know this, if it happens again, I just reload previous archive save and only lose the work on current harlot (an hour or so at most).
Many-Eyed Hydra
I was hoping she would be surprising players with that repeat visit. Ah well, a week or so to repair the damage and she'll be out properly at the end of next month (along with the boobfairy, who also has a similar surprise).
Many-Eyed Hydra
I have a pseudo cloud storage option in place, but that's something I'll look into. While I backup to an external hard drive every month, that's still on-site, so anything that takes out the site, takes out both (admittedly, if that happens, I have a lot more pressing worries to freak out about!) Having the codebase online would also make it easier for other people to add their own harlots, and that's something I want to enable at some point.
rareitor
Do you have any ideas as to what tools you might use to ease or automate archive backups so that these sort of incidents are less likely to be as damaging?
kenjibound
Software crashes are always alarming, no matter how well programs handle them. Take your time and get thing back where you want them. No pressure from my corner of the Internet!
Smith lfarrel
I hate to hear that man. I once accidentally deleted an entire HDD full of my most important content. It's a terrible feeling.. all you can do is keep pushing forward. thanks for continuing to put out the absolute best content on the internet regardless. I always look forward to your updates. Also wanted to ask, would it be difficult to post the raw text for the harlots like this on the regular? I know it would be just one more thing to do, and Im not sure if anyone else does this at all, but I personally really enjoy copying the text over to word and reading it like a story after ive used all options on the game. Makes it more enjoyable if I just want to go back and expirence harlot A or B without having to make all the choices again. Sometimes It takes a minute to make the right options come up so I can save them all. That's why I wanted to ask :)
Jimmy the Cannon
Oh man, that sucks. And that repeat visit is so good, too.
Noeru
Happens! It's sad but can't be helped :c Would it perhaps be possible to sync the project files with a cloud storage / repository like github/gitlab? You can set those up to always sync on every save so those things won't happen again.
Harold V. Campbell
Sorry to hear about your problems man. It always sucks to just lose work like that
