Hard disk crash, or no hard disk crash I’m not giving up so I give thee the latest fruit of my loins…

I’ve now updated my SoftImage|XSI Export Plug-in for Milkshape 3D to version 0.2. Wheee!

Lets forget about version 0.1, it was my bastard child and basically output junk. One gets the feeling your not correctly exporting a file when its own viewer and parser looks at it and goes “Huh?!”. Anyway, I started from scratch and re-wrote the darn thing and now what it spits out opens in both XSI Viewer and SoftImage XSI properly.

Apr. 29, 2004 @ 14:45

AARRRRRGGGHHHH!

Bugger, and other rude words. I’m sat at my computer at oooooh about 4am with another bout of insomnia trying to occupy my idle time.

So I bite the bullet, pull out the sheath of bills I have to pay this month and start the painful process of carving large chunks out of my meagre pay and giving them to the strangers that send me bits of paper once a month. Its a subtle game of making 2 fit into 1 and trying work out how many packets of noodles I can buy with the change.

So once that painful experience is done, I glance at the desktop of my PC and think to myself, “I really should get these files put away somewhere and back them up” and decide tomorrow morning would be a good time to do it when my minds a bit clearer. Or maybe a cup of coffee first…

So as I lazily trudge off to prep a drink, my mind wandering to dreaming thoughts of things like external drives and DVD writers to save all my work to Mr. Bob Fate and Harry. Coinkydink decide to knock at my door and strange noises start coming from my PC.

Funny how time stands still and your staring at the little green hard disk light on your PC that WONT GO OUT and the faint *whirrrrrrr* *click* *whirrrrrrrr* *click* of and IBM hard disk frantically clutching at its side in the throws of a major stroke.

Well fsck-a-doodle do… He’s dead Jim.

Of all the drives in my system to fail, it had to be the youngest one, my slave drive, with ALL MY BLOODY SOURCE FILES ON IT.

Well what can I say. If you’ve got anything I’ve ever made you better bloody well hang onto it cuz it aint there any more. It’s all fscking gone. The source code to HLMV, GUIStudioMDL, The Airborne models (and the new ones with animated faces), all the 1.2 models and sources, all the original layered texture files and about a billion other WIP’s for myself and other people.

I’ve tried the usual tricks but this drive is as dead as a do-do. Trust me, I know. I used to do PC hardware for a living. I’ve even tried swapping the logic board from another drive I have of the exact same model and type and its not responding at all. Current diagnostic is the bearing in the motors gone and from the sound of it it a) cant spin the motor, and when the bearing failed the disk platters went off level and the heads have crashed onto the media.

Ah well… at the moment I’m in that quiet patch before this all sinks in because I’ve got totally unreplaceable stuff on that drive and Im in no way able to afford a replacement. At the moment I’m posting this from an old 500Mb IDE drive I found in a box with Windows 95 installed on it. Weeeeeee feel the speed.

So errr, yeah. If you don’t hear from me for a while I’ve thrown myself of something high.

Apr. 23, 2004 @ 01:00

I’ve just finished up the public beta of GUI StudioMDL, another one of my natty little utilities for Half-Life modellers.

It gives you a nice and easy to use Windows front-end to the Half-Life model compiler taking the pain out of having to use MS-DOS everytime you want to compile your model.

It supports all the standard compiler features and can be set-up to auto-compile a model by drag-and-drop.

Apr. 20, 2004 @ 07:10

I’m still alive. Things are just a little crazy right now…

Apr. 9, 2004 @ 17:07

Wow, I just found out I’ve been asked to be a Beta tester for the next version (1.2) of Day of Defeat. It may not mean much to some, but it means I’ve earned the respect and trust of the development team and that means a lot to me.

Don’t bother asking me for any details about 1.2 though. I’m sworn to secrecy.