Omnimaga

Calculator Community => Other Calculators => Topic started by: simplethinker on April 19, 2009, 08:33:50 pm

Title: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: simplethinker on April 19, 2009, 08:33:50 pm
This has happened to any programmer at least once:  You're working on a project when, suddenly and without cause, something happens;  your batteries die, the calc crashes, a friend presses one too many buttons- fate has conspired against you :o.  Everything you had, gone :'(

We may never know how many projects have been lost.  But here, in this thread, some record of them will remain.  If this has ever happened to you and a large part of your life was lost, post what it was, how it was destroyed, and any lessons you've learned or wisdom to share.


A compilation of ways to ensure you never have to post an obituary in this thread:
- Backup often
- ...that means on a computer as well
- Use groups
- Backup multiple ways (USB, email, etc...)
- Don't rely heavily on commands such as Omnicalc's restoreMem(
- Test ASM programs on an emulator
- If someone clears your memory once, don't give them a chance to do it again.


Total casualties so far [as of 14 June 2009]: 24 confirmed
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: noahbaby94 on April 19, 2009, 08:37:15 pm
I've lost some progress on games but usually I have back ups.
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 19, 2009, 09:20:19 pm
the first time I got rickrolled I got depressed and deleted everything I was working on on my calculator including ROL4

nah just kidding, my worst case was Illusiat 2002, a 79 KB RPG that got about 300 hours of work (if not more) within 2 months and was meant to be the first Illusiat game to be split into chapters (5 were planned, but part 1 only contained the intro and one single map). I was 65% complete when mirage os corrupted my archive and I was forced to do a full memory reset. I lost the entire game and didn't touched a calculator for almost 2 months afterward. Unfortunately I didn't have a PC link cable and didn't even have a computer back then so I had no way to back up since my bro needed his calc and couldn,t keep a copy of my game. The day after this happened I seeked for a second calc for backup purposes (since I couldn't afford to spend money on a PC back then)
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Builderboy on April 19, 2009, 09:59:41 pm
So i had been working on Portal 2 for several weeks, and while this may not sound like a lot, it was quite a large and complicated engine.  I had created most of the levels and was starting to work on the dialog.  Then one fateful day, the two idiots from physics class stole my backpack, took my calculator and did a full memory reset. (Unfortunately they too are programmers, and know how to bypass most security programs)

I wasn't too distraught over this loss, i had written documents to guide me, and i had already created the engine once before, how hard could it be.  (And i invested in the best security program I could find).   So i recreated the engine, better than before.  It took less memory, less variables, was faster, and had more features.  I copied all the levels from the documents I had, and I had gotten even further than I had before.  And then one fateful day... well the same thing happened.  They bypassed my security and deleted all memory.

I too, spent a long while away from my calculator, but I'm back at it, giving it another go, and hopefully this third re-write will be better than both of the previous.
   
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never b
Post by: Drak on April 20, 2009, 12:14:04 pm
I was working on a project one time, Legend of Zelda Online - The Sanctuary of the Old Gods, when I accidentally left the window open. It was so cold outside, and there was a storm brewing. Like a gust of wind extinuising a flame on a candle, jack frost snuffed out the power from my computer before I could save and bu (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Candlejack)

(edit, added a hyperlink for those unfamilar with what just happened...)
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: simplethinker on April 20, 2009, 12:22:25 pm
I was working on a project one time, Legend of Zelda Online - The Sanctuary of the Old Gods, when I accidentally left the window open. It was so cold outside, and there was a storm brewing. Like a gust of wind extinuising a flame on a candle, jack frost snuffed out the power from my computer before I could save and bu
So you were unable to backup on the computer, and then shortly thereafter something happened to your calculator?
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Iambian on April 20, 2009, 03:34:22 pm
Thankfully, nothing has happened to me as of yet. Since very few of my projects are built on-calc, I haven't had much of a problem with calc corruption. Back in my "earlier" calc programming days, in which I did build stuff on-calc, I've been blessed with a calc to computer link cable for the entire experience, so I've been backing up. Most of what I did "lose" was at most an hour or two worth of work.

In this distant "future", I personally don't miss anything that I've lost in this way. As for my ASM projects, I keep multiple backups where I deem useful. Multiple backups of my entire development environment has been made to several flashdrives and a few computers (some of them date back so long that I'll look over them just for nostalgia purposes).

Currently, CaDan is protected in part by a not-so-recent email to myself with relation to the project. A copy was made to my 16GB flashdrive and an "active" copy is always in my laptop, sitting both in the dev folder and in the SD card. The idea for using the SD card came from a friend in the math lab, who reminded me that laptop harddrives are notoriously flaky. This one hasn't caused problems yet, but I still keep backups of full source on my SD card.

Backups include WinRAR'd "past" versions of the program, with a current version sitting as-is.

Celtic III is, in part, backed up by multiple flashdrives, and the postings on UTI. Retracing my steps through the various versions shouldn't be that hard, in the event the most recent one is lost.

In short, even though you'll hopefully never use them, ensure that your backups have backups in all sorts of medium, including USB flashdrives, SD cards, multiple computer HDD's, email accounts, and if you want open-source, full source posted to the forum(s) of your choice. Especially the forums, since you can pretty much go anywhere and work on your program, with or without your dev environment.

If it's an on-calc thing, ensure that you regularly "group" changes (which saved me many times). If you have a cable, transfer those groups out and onto a computer. Never allow anyone to touch your calculator. If someone wanted to borrow your calculator, the following excuse has usually worked for me : "Can't let you borrow this. It's in development." If that doesn't work a stern "No." works after that.
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: kalan_vod on April 21, 2009, 02:02:30 pm
Working on many projects, played someones game (that required to archive some programs). Once finished with the game, I went to do a RAM clear but accidentally hit Archive reset....Lost 12 projects during that time...Haha
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 21, 2009, 04:47:46 pm
ouch I remember that x.x I think it was Zelda DLQ, right? But didn't DLQ actually crashed your calc instead? I remember you badmouthed me about it a long while ago (I think like 3 or 4 years ago) but then I simply pointed out the rule mentionned in the readme saying "I'm not going to hold responsible for any damage this game might cause to your calculator. Use at your own risk." :P That sucked though because I think a lot of your projects were nearing completion, especially Res and DDR and I was personally looking forward for them a lot.

I actually never found the source of that crash. I never even got a crash during making this game. I think it might have been caused by using MirageOs or xLIB after/before running the game, which had major incompatibility with Zapi asm lib
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Galandros on April 22, 2009, 02:35:46 pm
I didn't make big projects yet but I always have some group, a backup in the computer.

I have two external hard drives with backups. And sometimes my flash drive with a latest backup when I have hours of work...

e-mail, I don't use... But I though of using FTP. (and access it on many computers on the world with Internet) xD

Omnicalc RestoreMem saved me 1 or 2 times. :) But not always... It was just a little thing though.

@BuilderBoy: you are in a harsh school for calculator development.
@Iambian: what percentage of people have to hear the "No."?
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Iambian on April 22, 2009, 05:24:09 pm
(...)
@Iambian: what percentage of people have to hear the "No."?
Roughly in the 1 percentile. When I did serious development on-calc, everyone knew I'd go absolutely crazy if anything happened to what I was working on, so they wouldn't ask me more than once if I gave my "traditional" response. Took a little while before those asking knew that was my form of "No. Quit asking."

Your mileage may vary. Truly depends on how you are seen at whatever school you go at.

Me? Won't get into those details.
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: TIfanx1999 on April 22, 2009, 09:51:07 pm
I've lost a couple of projects, but nothing memorable (as I can't seem to recall anything specific at the moment). Usually this was due to some ASM program or another freezing and causing me a RAM clear. This was back on my old TI-83 before I had a link cable, and archive memory didnt exist.
@Drak: Wait, did you just say Candlejack? You shouldn't just throw that name around casually! Oh Shi...
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 22, 2009, 11:36:59 pm
i never lent my calc to anyone at school to try my game, because i know some assholes could have deleted the entire memory
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: kalan_vod on April 23, 2009, 01:49:46 pm
ouch I remember that x.x I think it was Zelda DLQ, right? But didn't DLQ actually crashed your calc instead? I remember you badmouthed me about it a long while ago (I think like 3 or 4 years ago) but then I simply pointed out the rule mentionned in the readme saying "I'm not going to hold responsible for any damage this game might cause to your calculator. Use at your own risk." :P That sucked though because I think a lot of your projects were nearing completion, especially Res and DDR and I was personally looking forward for them a lot.

I actually never found the source of that crash. I never even got a crash during making this game. I think it might have been caused by using MirageOs or xLIB after/before running the game, which had major incompatibility with Zapi asm lib
Could have been omnicalc, since I was working with the xLIB program + omnicalc at the time...
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 23, 2009, 02:03:33 pm
Oh ok I see. x.x

Also I never found Omnicalc RestoreMem function to be very reliable. Some people says it saved them many times, but I tried it often before on my SE and sometimes everything would be corrupted with programs weighing at like 50000 bytes and stuff like that
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: nitacku on April 23, 2009, 05:31:05 pm
I've lost quite a few good programs before.
I can't even remember how many I've lost.

The original AI Checkers was lost when I fried my calc trying to connect it to a DC power supply. The calc was still covered under warranty, so I was able to get a new one by sending it in. I wonder if TI ever found the program... meh, probably not. Good news is that the re-written code was much better than the original. It always works out that way doesn't it?
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 23, 2009, 10:30:21 pm
In case some people don't check other topics much and for those who don't frequent IRC, I forgot to mention that when I lost all Illusiat 2002 work back in March 2002, I also lost Illusiat 1 through 4 and Donjon (similar to the old Illusiat games but on homescreen like Illusiat 8 and it was very hard). Fortunately, the first 3 games were rather simple due to simple graph screen graphics, but Illusiat 4 was simply impossible to recreate. For dungeon I didn't remembered the dungeon layouts and enemies enough because I didn't replayed the game a lot since it was quite long (about 7-8 hours) and I was in the process of making Illusiat 4 at the time
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: calc84maniac on April 23, 2009, 11:44:23 pm
Oh ok I see. x.x

Also I never found Omnicalc RestoreMem function to be very reliable. Some people says it saved them many times, but I tried it often before on my SE and sometimes everything would be corrupted with programs weighing at like 50000 bytes and stuff like that
I'm pretty sure that happens only if you Garbage Collect (thus moving around stuff in archive) then Restore Mem (restoring the pointers to the old locations).
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 24, 2009, 03:47:03 am
nah I got it to happen almost 80% of the time when I tried it. However, back then I had an older ROM (1.13 or 1.14 I think). It was more reliable past Omnicalc 1.20, though. Back in the 1.0/1.1 days (when Omnicalc still had a clipboard functionality), it sometimes caused archive corruption and stuff requiring a full memory reset.

Btw, for those who still use MirageOs 1.1 (we never know?), if you added the : character at the beginning of an homescreen entry it caused a program called ! or # I think to be displayed in MirageOs. Archiving these caused something similar to what killed Illusiat 2002 project to happen. I don't remember what happened when locking/hiding these entries, though. I think when locking them down the goto option would simply not appear when you did an error and hiding them did the same thing than archiving them
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: simplethinker on April 29, 2009, 11:47:06 am
I recently had a close call.  After just finishing the preliminary testing of a new movement routine (which already entailed major changes to the code), I was in the middle of converting the initialization code to accommodate it.  All the changes were in RAM-resident programs.  The new code utilized my String->Matrix ASM program; unfortunately, I accidentally transferred an old buggy version instead of the current one, and you can probably guess what happened next.  I ran Chip's Challenge, but when I got to the title screen I remembered I hadn't backed up, so instead of continuing (the next chunk of code would run that ASM program) I quit and backed-up.  Then I ran it and it crashed on me.

Morals of the story:  Delete or at least label old buggy versions of things, and of course back up major changes.
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 29, 2009, 07:57:45 pm
ouch that sucks, glad you could backup in time, and yeah when I send a backup on my PC i usually move the old ones in a different sub folder
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: simplethinker on April 29, 2009, 08:22:46 pm
ouch that sucks, glad you could backup in time, and yeah when I send a backup on my PC i usually move the old ones in a different sub folder
Right now my backup folder has 18 versions of Chip's Challenge.  They're all dated and have short summaries of the major changes.  Just in case there's a huge mistake that I didn't notice for a while.
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 29, 2009, 08:24:43 pm
yeah this is why i keep my old versions too. Once I accidentally sent a old file from my TI-Nspire to my 83+ instead of doing the opposite and it was a good thing that I still had a copy on the PC
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Ti-newb on June 01, 2009, 09:03:43 pm
the programs i have/make arn't usually too big. and i have a habit on writing them down on my note book. * i find it easy to edit on it. cause i can enter side notes and like. do edits easly. and it's like a library of programs XD which is cool
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: skuller972 on June 01, 2009, 09:11:35 pm
good idea... i wish there was a cell phone app... or an IDE that you can type, and make notes on, and even run tests of it without needing to open anything else or load it on to your calculator or an emulator! that would be hot.
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Ti-newb on June 01, 2009, 09:40:03 pm
maybe you should make one.. xD. i don't think you'll expect anymore downloads then the people that actually want it.. (which im guessing.. isn't alot)

Yo DJ. i don't know why.. but i remember ur uh. Reputation level being like 100..Oo". *can u spam Reputation levels?
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 01, 2009, 11:14:49 pm
well with the recent incident with zera i don't really feel i really deserve this reputation so I just deleted my positive karma (positive karma data is separate from negative one, btw)
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Eeems on June 02, 2009, 11:09:26 am
aww, that's too bad, I'll put you up a bit...
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Ti-newb on June 02, 2009, 10:39:16 pm
Ye.il put you up too.

And uhh. DJ. i think i stole 1st places on lots of games had .. Lols. Sozzy XD
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: noahbaby94 on June 02, 2009, 11:03:01 pm
Ti-newb do you mind thinking a bit more before you post? I honestly can't understand half your questions.
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Ti-newb on June 06, 2009, 04:53:43 pm
Shet. i should start thinking b4 i make another post. *im currently trying to find out what i meant.. on my earlier post..*


Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on June 06, 2009, 05:24:43 pm
Just make sure there isn't any typo/missing words/words you forgot to remove that could make the post less understandable. Also make sure they are on-topic (I mean related to the first post of the topic)
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: Eeems on June 13, 2009, 10:01:20 pm
I was playing around with Celtic III and trying to figure out identity(4 and I accidentally cleared my RAM, and everything I had made was lost....luckily I had backed it up to make this :) I am glad I did
Title: Re: Real Life Nightmares: The stories of what could have been, but will never be
Post by: tifreak on June 14, 2009, 03:19:41 pm
Hmm.. AODR has died numerous times, and AOD2 was wiped out once while I was at school, losing about 2 hours of work that I had to redo. The latest casualty was pokemon purple, as the calc had been dropped and submerged in water. Thankfully, I had the update of the code before I had done the clean out of junk coding and fixed things, so that is what I am working on now. AODR's death and the set back of AOD2 had the common connection of having calcs that had MOS on them. I still refuse to use that App to this day.