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…

Anyway, I do have some updates planned for this site. I’ve updated the theme that this site and all my AMP sites use, which I think looks really nice (or at least sucks less), and I’m also going to be launching AMP Universe soon. I don’t remember if I’ve talked about this before, but it’s mainly going to serve as a RSS reader for all of my sites, including Twitter, Youtube, and these WP sites. But this got me thinking after a while, do I really need to have another separate site just for these games, or for my plugins? Considering I’m talking about AMP Universe and a new theme on my games site, I started thinking I should have just one blog that I use for all of my internet-related output, for AMP Home, Games, Plugins, etc. Of course, after a while this would become like my andrewanimation Youtube channel, with just a ton of stuff that won’t interest most of the people that visit. And I’m also making plans to turn my WP plugin site into a place for WP and Chrome plugins, since I’m doing both now. But I don’t want to restructure that and then shove everything on to one blog.

I don’t know, maybe I should just leave things the way they are, maybe I shouldn’t. What are your thoughts on this?

Okay, so for starters, I’ve made a bunch of changes/fixes on the site. The most noticeable feature is the tabs at the top of pages. You can’t see it here, but go to any of the pages through the Flash header and you’ll see them in action. It looks a bit strange where there are no subpages (specifically on the contact page), but I can’t really do anything about that. The only other noticeable thing I changed was my history manager sidebar plugin (it just says ‘Post History’ here, but I coded it myself. It doesn’t look all that great when there is no post history, but once I actually post news here more often, it should look better. I’ve actually been trying to get that into the Wordpress plugin list, but the process for doing that is really complicated.

Now for the news. My latest project has been creating a new engine. My reasons for doing this were:

1. In Engine 5, I had code scattered all over the place (timeline, character, individual MCs), and hundreds of comments mashed in there (mostly old code that I wasn’t sure if I would ever need). There wasn’t even any particular pattern for what code came where, which made debugging or changing something a real nightmare.
2. Engine 5 was a project I started last August when I barely knew anything about Actionscript (and had to use AS1). All these archaic methods I was using were probably not very efficient, and so that needed to be changed.
3. Engine 5 rain painfully slow on a regular computer. I’m talking 10-15 FPS kind of painful. It’s fine on mine, but I have 4GB of RAM and very fast processor. Since I don’t think this is going to be my target audience, I decided I needed to fix that. Unfortunately, I had no idea for what to do about the lag, other that disabling codes at random and seeing if the CPU usage went down.

So, Engine 6 is a lot more organized, uses better methods (WHILE loops instead of FOR loops), and runs fine on my old computer (which was actually fast when I first got it 5 years ago). I don’t think I’m going to put it online, since it plays a lot like the original engine (with some minor enhancements), and I think I’ll wait until I make the Inkman demo. Which I first mentioned back in December.

Oh, and one more thing. For those sites linking to me, could you please change the RSS to http://andrewanimation.biz/games/feed or just this site, as I won’t be using the old one anymore.

So I guess the first piece of news I have to post is the updates for this site and the main andrewanimation.biz. If you register here, please leave comments about your thoughts on the site and the regular one. Note that this area is still in progress a bit, but if you see anything that looks odd or find something that shouldn’t be, please let me know.

I’ve installed a few plugins to get this site looking the way I want it. I’m not 100% satisfied with them (and never will be), but if there are any other things that you think the site should be able to, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can find something to do that.