Testers wanted

Hi! I have an Inform piece I’d like some testers for. Some brief details:

  • Closer to ‘story’ than ‘game,’ light on the puzzles.
  • Both bug report and feedback on prose would be great.
  • Both beginning and experienced testers would also be great.

PM me here. Thanks!

I’d be happy to take a look.

(Since I only just registered I can’t send PMs, but I assume I can still receive them.)

Hi – I know a few of you are wondering what was going on with this.

Long story short: The Inform 7 IDE ate my entire project after saving the file, with no way of getting it back. Therefore, I won’t be entering the competition, as I cannot rewrite the entire game and get it beta tested in a week.

The exact same thing happened to me while working on my IntroComp13 follow-up. I7 glitched out and ate itself. I now back-up every ten minutes or so.

That’s bad and really sucks! What versions are you using?

I said “I7 glitched out and ate itself” but I meant that it ate my project.

I’m using the new build.

Mac? Windows?

Oh. Sorry. Windows.

I’m not sure this is a new build thing – the exact same thing happened earlier this year when I was using 6L02, but I chalked it up to my computer being awful.

The one common thread in both is that I had saved the file just before restarting the computer. Was that the case for you?

I can’t quite remember. I do recall leaving my laptop then returning to it and watching the I7 program “glitch-out” (that is, blink and refresh super fast so that I can’t do anything to it). Then, upon restarting the program, it has eaten my game. I tried various restore methods to no avail, chalked it up to god hating me, and proceeded to have writer’s block for a few months.

I am so sorry. That is just the worst. :frowning: I hope after recovering emotionally from that suckerpunch, you get a chance to re-write it and enter it another year! If you need help with it at any stage, I’d be happy to check it out.

aww thanks! :slight_smile:

(me reads this in horror and copies his .inform to drop box)

Gigabytes go half buck a dozen these days. Just make a copy of your work sequentially before ANY tweak to the code.
For my games I have reached the version “AWAKENING_copy 65.inform” or something.
Use Dropbox because: 1) you can reach you code from anywhere; 2) Dropbox is way safer than you average hard-drive. They pay for backup hardware, too.

How to use Git for an Inform project:

Create a directory to be the Git repository.
Put your Foo.inform project in it.

git init
git add Foo.inform/Source/story.ni
git add Foo.inform/uuid.txt
git commit

(I don’t put anything else in source control. The Skein file changes too much, the settings are easy to reconstruct, and everything else is rebuilt at compile time.)

If you like you can create a .gitignore file with these lines:

.inform/.*
*.inform/Build
*.inform/Index

This stops all the other project stuff from showing up in a “git status”. Do this after you’ve added the files, so that it doesn’t get pissy about git-adding uuid.txt.

When working, do a “git commit -a” every night or after you’ve done a particularly choice bit of work. Push to Github or Bitbucket or somewhere for backups. (I like Bitbucket because it permits an unlimited number of small private projects for free.) (And then I pay them a few dollars a month because that way I’m a customer.)

I’ve had this happen over a year ago so it was there pre-6L02 also. For me, it seemed if Inform didn’t shut down properly while I had unsaved changes in the editor it would lose the entire source.

Luckily, I’ve always used a dropbox folder as my project folder, so I get the backup of that…I also use git for source control, so I’m good there. It was kind of frightening the first time it’s happened.

Spitballing, but does it matter if you check or uncheck “Clean build files from project files before closing”?

If anyone can come up with a way to reproduce this it would definitely be worth filing a bug report (like if you can make it happen by force quitting a dummy project with unsaved changes). And is everyone reporting this using Windows?