So I went to open up the Inkman file yesterday, now that I actually had some time to work on it. For those of you not familiar with Flash, basically all of the code for the game is stored in .as files, which are basically just plain text (meaning you can read them in a program like notepad).

I opened up the file, and I got this:

Now I know I don’t always follow the best coding practices, but I usually give my variables better names than [actual variable name removed because of display problems]. Not to mention I don’t just stop coding in the middle of a line, in the middle of an if statement, in the middle of a function. So I’m thinking, FD must have opened it wrong. So I opened it up in Notepad++, and I got this:

So apparently the content was all there, it was just corrupted. Apparently FD saves me the trouble of having to see that.

So my next step was to open it up in a hex editor. The corruption was really there, it wasn’t just one byte screwing up the whole file.

Coincidentally, the corruption runs from 0×4000 to 0×7FFF, if that means anything to people who know a lot about computers (the rest of the file is fine, it’s just that one block). Unfortunately, that’s about 500 lines of code. I know it starts and ends on a round number, meaning there must have been some kind of corruption involved.

So you’re probably thinking, “Oh no, does that mean Andrew has to start from scratch?” No, that would be too easy for me. I have backups of my entire web directory, the latest being from February 27. I know that seems like a long time ago but honestly I’m not even sure if I did any work on the game between then and now.

I haven’t actually tried loading the backup file into Flash yet to check for incompatibilities, but I’ll let you know the results soon.

[update from the future]
Okay, there are basically two things I lost. The first was a big chunk of swimming code that I was just going to chuck anyway, since it wasn’t coming out the way I wanted it. The other was about 20 tiny bugfixes, like little things that I did when I only had 10-15 minutes to spend on the game. While none of these are huge losses, I have to remember what all of them are, and then remember how I fixed them. None of these are game-breaking, just annoying. Which is annoying that I have to fix all of them again. Sigh…