StuartK wrote:
Is it confirmed that the corruption is definitely not a gradual process, which might happen over multiple DROD sessions? It might be useful to have more than one level of backup...
I'm pretty sure it's all or nothing. I considered having something like your backup batch file, but decided that without evidence to show a gradual corruption, it wasn't worth taking up the extra disk space.
Also (since I've not tried B46 yet) is there any kind of 'please send your corrupted .dats <here>' prompt in DROD b46?
Well, the .dats by themselves aren't that useful to determine the cause. I've got a good selection of corrupted .dats that I used to write the backup/restore code, but I probably won't need more.
I also beefed up the error logging so that drod.err contains a really detailed log of what the user did. I think at this point, for technical simplicity, I would rather just receive bug reports by e-mail, and we've got instructions for that on DROD.net and in the help pages.
If it's a single button click to compress and upload, you might get more (perhaps) useful data. Optionally harvest stuff like hardware configuration, OS, dll versions, free memory, tasks running etc?
Yeah, I'm basically with you here, but I'm playing down the importance of system configuration factors from what I know about the bug and discussions I've had with the author of the database library.
Autobackup while a DROD session is running? I've had sessions last hours (though I haven't encountered corruption having made any significant progress)
That makes sense, with a tradeoff that I have to close and reopen the database to do it, which is slow. I'm hedging my bets here with the backup/restore--it isn't intended to be the ultimate solution. Let me explain the DROD:AE release strategy:
This weekend, I'm planning on making AE release announcements to SDL's page, SourceForge, DROD.net, of course, and maybe a few other places. The idea is that we will release to a larger group of players who are likely to be developers and technical types--more forgiving of bugs and having skills to describe them. We will explain about the remaining data-loss bug in release notes. I think DROD:AE is reasonably stable so that someone can enjoy it without a beta-tester level of commitment. More eyeballs and good error logs may give us enough information to find the bug and release a patched version.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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