I'm Doomed not to finish my mods.

[douglas quaid]

Hey guys,

I think I'm not meant to finish any of my mods. Yet again I'm faced with another very annoying problem. In between time working on Total Recall I go back and forth to a small horror project I'm making. Everything seemed to be going well up until today. I've been working on a pretty sweet level and I didn't have any problems over the past week. But today, my God! I opened up the editor and did a quick load of my map (as you do) and the map has disappeared. I went into the maps folder and the map isn't there. What? The only level I've been working on has disappeared but the rest are still there. I really can't see how this happened. I even went and checked the recycle bin, which I knew damn well it wasn't there.

I'm getting so sick and tired of these stupid setbacks. There have been too many since I've started modding and I'm seriously thinking of forgetting about Doom 3 modding altogether.

Has anyone else ran into this problem and if so how have you overcome it? I still have the *.bak file if that helps but right now I'm very angry

[Zombie]

Everyone does it.

But it is all about tailoring what you want to make to how you work as a person.

If you're easily intimdated by large amounts of work, then keep your projects small and concise.
If you're bored by smaller projects, then create a challenging one that is a bit bigger.
If you have a bad attention span, make projects that can be completed in a short amount of time.

Find inspiration and people who can help inspire and motivate you. Otherwise you'll feel like no one may appreciate your work.

Over the past 10 years I have started about 6 different levels and not finished most of them or scrapped them or deleted them. It happens to everyone.

Also be smart about what you do and managing yourself.

Back up files every day, use a local SVN, make a list, get a white board.

If you aren't managing your content creation, then your mod/level/what ever will probably not see the light of day.

Just stay focused and make what you need to make to complete your project.

My 2 cents.

[douglas quaid]

I suppose in my frustration I made it harder for people to understand exactly what I wanted to achieve from this post.

Okay, the map's name is 2a.map. When I started the level I saved it twice, one as a backup, in my backup folder. The latter folder is where I've done most of the work. This folder is where the problem is. The 2a.map from this folder has disappeared but the 2a.bak remains. Is it possible to combine the backup folder's 2a.map with the most up to date 2a.bak file and retrieve the 'lost' map?

[Zombie]

Yes that is possible.

[douglas quaid]

Some great succinct advice there Zombie. Care to elaborate?

[Zombie]

Open the .bak in the editor and open the .map in the editor, spot the differences and copy and paste what's missing.

[douglas quaid]

Ah, I see now. Worked a charm, phew! Thanks mate!

[Zombie]

Now copy that file some where on the internet

[The Happy Friar]

Not sure if it can be done with GoogleDrive, but you can setup MS OneDrive to sync a local folder to their cloud.  I do that so I no longer need to e-mail myself files to use on my wife's machine.  Very handy.

[Bladeghost]

Usually in the C: drive d3edit makes autosave files ,like autosave1 and autosave1.bak and autosave2 and autosave2.bak
that's one thing you can check, my advice is to burn to a blank cd or dvd at least once a week or when you can using one that can be written to a few times at least and always have a hard copy just in case, the term save and save often applies to development more so than playing. now having a hard drive die is bad enough, but always backup your work.
hope everything is well now, best always!

[bkt]

Google Drive = 15GB free cloud storage.  USE IT.

Also, you could always consider setting up a version control so your work is automatically uploaded to a web server whenever needed.

[The Happy Friar]

In DoomEdit preferences there should be an option for snapshots.  It will fill your map folder up with hundreds of backups.  I use it on a regular basis.  Very handy! 

[BloodRayne]

Just use local source control. Download SVN & and a tortoise client, it's not more than 10 minutes work to set up. Commit changes to the repository after each time you map.

I have all versions of all incarnations of all my maps and all my work in my repository. I could go back to any version of any map (or any other work) because of version control.

Losing work like this is really completely unnecessary.

[trebor]

I use Git for source codes and Subversion for assets. I can't live without it.
You also might want to try TortoiseHG as it does not require to set up a server like Subversion.
You can commit your stuff into your local repository and have a history of all files. It works more like Git however it has a decent GUI and better support for binary files.
It is recommended by Blender artists for working with assets.

[oneofthe8devilz]

I have only one word for you douglas quaid...

"BACKUP" !

I know it sounds simple and stupid... but the only thing that will reliably keep disasters from happening is a disciplined backup attitude... Even if you've worked on something the entire day and are dead tired and just want to shutdown your rig, invest those extra minutes confirming whatever you worked on is operational and then perform a backup...

I do daily backups on 6 redundant systems of which two are on remote internet located servers... (with multiple backup hdds for per system)