You know, for the longest time I couldn't bring myself to care about the game engine I spent so much time building last year. To the point where I didn't even bother to back it up to anything but the external.
Now that the external seems to be fried, though...
What I learned this weekend: Data Necromancy.
The current working directory seems to be irrecoverable but the latest "submitted" (my version of SVN looks suspiciously like just a bunch of numbered directories) copy was pulled pretty much intact, which is probably more important. I also managed to pull my music library (thank God, because I can't find a place to
the Dawn of Mana OST anymore) and
a decent amount of porn.The hardware itself is pretty much salvageable as a decent 250gb IDE drive. I can't put it into my current PC for the same reason I can't seem to upgrade my video card anymore (Dell's frankensteinien component placement basically obstructs it) but once I've saved up enough to have the computer I'm building put together I might slot it in for... I don't know, something to put a quarter terabyte of hentai on or something. I'm not in a huge hurry to format the thing anyway, since I don't yet know if there's anything else I'm going to want to make WISE FWOM ITS GWAVE.
The upshot of all this is that I know see a pretty compelling reason to just go open-source with all this for people's consideration. Those of you who want to see proof that I actually do do stuff (that you just can't see) can wait for that to drop in a few days, after I've gone through and cleaned out its guts. Some of the fancier crap (non-iterative linked-list merge sort, hyper-optimized sprite/quad rotation, some probably uselessly overcomplicated collision detection) might be of some use if you really want to go hunting for mushrooms.
For my part I'm just gonna take my old work for reference and start a new project on something that's not fucking Visual Studio. I actually really like VC as an IDE, but the fact that I
still don't know how the fuck to build a release executable on it has convinced me that I might be better off migrating to something more hobbyist-friendly.
This thread probably should have gone into Programmer's Wanking Corner but then nobody would have read it, including the programmers.