Developer Fails of the day

[Smokebox]

Well I suppose somebody has to do it seeing as DTG don't seem to want to do that many steamers anymore! Although me thinks we could slightly be going off topic here
Edward

Yeah, slightly - this could be the subject of an entirely new thread.

[AndiS]

On the other hand, going off topic is a developer fail you see every day.

[SteamSoundsSupreme]

My BIG fail yesterday was to do with route building. I committed the cardinal sin of route building - I forgot to regularly save my progress!! I had been busily working away for 2 hours on some fine details last night, when, BAM!! A CTD! Why oh why hadn't I been pressing save every 10 mins The most annoying thing about it is that I was fiddling with some unimportant lofted item. I was trying to split it. The split function wasn't working. It was the multiple clicks of the mouse that caused the CTD..............................Now I'm having to redo yesterday's work...............................

Signed Anonymous

[Nobkins]

I must have wasted hours on TPR like that. The save takes 2 mins because of the huge track database so saving is a fine balance of frustration with the knowledge of imminent crash could loose lots of work!

[cjbarnes5294]

I remember how laggy it got whilst I altered the gradient of roads and fences in Knaresborough, which goes to show how much strain the game was under at that point.

Chris

[Smokebox]

My route-building fail was that, even though I was saving a lot, I didn't make backups to an external hard drive, so when my PC's HD broke, I lost the entire route. I never did try to rebuild it.
I now make backups on three different drives! (luckily, because a short time ago, one of those melted too).

[cjbarnes5294]

Oh god, you spend ages manually changing the transformation matrices of your child objects, then to save time you copy and paste the matrix to another child that needs to be in the same place. Just make sure you copy and paste the correct ones ie. don't copy the ones you want to paste into and paste into the ones you want to copy from.

I'll start again!

Chris

[AndiS]

The most annoying thing about it is that I was fiddling with some unimportant lofted item. I was trying to split it. The split function wasn't working. It was the multiple clicks of the mouse that caused the CTD.

In the early days, I found loads of orphan track fragments in Tracks.bin. Nowadays, you see rails sticking to slips at right angles if the world editor does not like your geometry. So I developed a healthy mistrust against the editor in general. If there is something that looks fishy, I delete it as a whole and relay/rebuild it.

But I cannot brag there either, I did loose stuff, but in my case, it's just test routes. And yes, saving and reloading the route does disturb the workflow for me, too.

Maybe if several renowned route builders petition for it, DTG implement an auto-save function - to a temporary file please, not the original - like office software and most text editors had it for years.

Oh god, you spend ages manually changing the transformation matrices of your child objects, then to save time you copy and paste the matrix to another child that needs to be in the same place. Just make sure you copy and paste the correct ones ie. don't copy the ones you want to paste into and paste into the ones you want to copy from.

Reminds me on the first time ever I lost work on a computer. I sat down happily to resume work on my first major program and typed SAVE "myprogram.bac" instead of LOAD "myprogram.bac". The computer duly saved nothing under the name of my precious program, deleting it thereby. And no, there was nothing like a .bak file at that time. And no backup, I guess I only owned one floppy disk back then.

[eyore]

Minus signs!

The number of times I copy and paste a dimension and forget to add/delete the minus sign then wonder where the child/coupling etc disappeared to. Made worse since TS2014 by the new blueprint editor not recognizing the num pad minus sign.

[Smokebox]

I just had a very strange fail - one that's lost me half a day!

Everything was going great, but all of a sudden, the loco just stopped responding to keystrokes. I checked everything, rebooted the PC, deleted the loco entirely from the Assets folder and reexported it, but nada de nada. Finally, I spotted the mistake - I'd accidentally deleted the text from the "name" field at the beginning of the engine blueprint, so my exported engine had no name in the blueprint. It still had its display name, so it all looked ok in the scenario editor. I put the name back into the blueprint, exported it again, and it all works perfectly now!

It reminds me of another frequent fail - pressing 7 by accident (when I meant to press F7 to export something), not realising that a field also happened to be selected, with the result that something was replaced, unwittingly, with "7". Very hard to spot afterwards!