Root Element Problem

[NickyNyce]

I'm in shock right now, and pray someone can help me. I had AGS open and was working on my game, when I went an searched the internet for something. When I came back and clicked on something, AGS froze, and I had to shut down my computer manually. When I rebooted and tried to open my game, I get this. 

*Major panic mode*



And then this...

[Slasher]

This may help:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=37697.msg495541#msg495541

If all fails you may need to delete (or move out of folder) Game.agf and scroll to Game.agf.bak and rename to Game.agf, hence replacing original Game.agf

fingers crossed

[NickyNyce]

The problem is exactly the same, which was caused by doing exactly what Atelier did.

Sadly, when I try to do what the thread says, I get the same error. I would like to try your other suggestion, but I'm hoping that someone else might have another idea before I go that route. I seriously can't sleep. I've been tossing and turning for hours at the thought that I've lost a few weeks worth of work.

Anyone   ...

[Crimson Wizard]

First of all, the user preference file is not Game.agf, it is Game.agf.user, and I am not sure if it is ever backed up. Actually, you may simply delete it, because it does not keep any game data, just some info about project workflow.

Regarding second error, can you upload the Game.agf and its backup file to let us see the contents?

Note, in the very worst case you should still have all your scripts, rooms and graphics intact.

[NickyNyce]

Thank you Crimson Wizard for trying to help. When you say backup file, do you mean backup_acsprset.spr that is located in the game folder?

And Happy Thanksgiving everyone

https://www.mediafire.com/?5l7659m68sj3l76   Here is the Game.agf file

[Gurok]

Well, that's a really broken Game.agf file. 2,062,185 zeroes! Is the Game.agf.bak file the same?

EDIT: Sorry, to be clear. I think CW wanted you to upload "Game.agf.bak" as well. Hopefully it'll be okay.

[NickyNyce]

I'm getting dizzy thinking about all the changes I made since I last backed up my game. I think I'm going to vomit.

https://www.mediafire.com/?n3q28c8har3rk11   ....Here the backup_acsprset.spr file located in the folder.

https://www.mediafire.com/?34frh6g5f0phhrt     ..........Here is the Game.agf.bak file

[Crimson Wizard]

No, the bak is broken too

I'm getting dizzy thinking about all the changes I made since I last backed up my game. I think I'm going to vomit.

As I noted above, you may probably still use your latest scripts, rooms, fonts and graphics (acsprset.spr), because they are stored in the separate files.
You may try replacing/importing them in your backuped copy.
(Just make backup of the backup first)

What changes will be lost:
1. Dialog scripts;
2. Any project elements (GUIs, Characters, Views etc).
3. Palette (8-bit games)
4. Global variables.

[NickyNyce]

Thanks for your time Crimson Wizard and Gurok. I'll decide where to go from here.

[Mandle]

Oh, shit no!!!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Please, pleeeease don't say it's true...

I am praying for you Nicky and hope you can get back on track as soon as possible. I hope any rebuilding will go smoothly. I really do...

This is any game dev's worst nightmare come true and I'm sure you don't even want to hear this right now, but sometimes great things come from redoing something over again a second time...

Now you can slap me for even saying that in this moment that must be horrible for you:

* Mandle holds out his face

[NickyNyce]

I'm not too far behind actually. This could have been much worse. Thank goodness for backups, which should be done more often than I thought.

Good thing I've been dragging ass while making this game, I should get back to where I was very soon.

Thanks again for the help guys.

[Retro Wolf]

I recommend using dropbox to backup your files automatically. You can even "rewind" 30 days to earlier versions.
Glad to hear you're not too far behind!

[NickyNyce]

I do have dropbox. I'll look into it Retro Wolf, sounds like something I should be doing, thanks.

[Adeel]

One thing I can think of is to move the whole game project's folder to the dropbox and resume working from there. You can then forget about backing up and dropbox's application will constantly backup any files which were changed. I've never tried it but now that I've thought of it, it's something I should be doing.

Good luck on your project. Sorry to hear about your loss. Power outages (aka Load Shedding) is a common problem in my country. I've lost my game projects twice because of it.

[Crimson Wizard]

You may also use any available source control system, like SVN, Git, Mercurial, etc; this way you won't only have backups, but also see a history of all your changes and can add comments for every modification you do.
They require some time to learn though.

[Mandle]

I should get back to where I was very soon.

That's awesome news mate! I was so worried it might have been game-over , and that RAM ghost would have haunted you forever...

[Retro Wolf]

One thing I can think of is to move the whole game project's folder to the dropbox ...

That's exactly what I do, whether it's a game project, sprite I'm working on, or just a plain text file for random ideas; everything is in the dropbox folder.
If I want to work from a different computer it's handy because it automatically syncs with the server and I can just pick up from where I left off.

[OneDollar]

Sounds like you're getting back on track, but here's something that a lot of people don't seem to know about. If you're on Windows 7 or 8 you may well have previous versions turned on by default (if not, and if you have the spare disk space, it's worth turning on).

Right-click your AGS project folder, click Properties then go to the Previous Versions tab. If Previous Versions is switched on for that hard drive you should see a list of snapshots of that folder along with the date and time they were taken. Pick one then click Open (don't click Restore or you'll overwrite your current version). This will open up a new window that shows you the data in that folder as it existed when that snapshot was taken. You can then browse around, copy individual files out or just copy the whole folder somewhere else, load it up in AGS and see if it works and what's missing.

Oh, and always put a copy of the stuff you *have* got somewhere else before you start trying to restore old stuff, just in case you overwrite something you did need or the backup version doesn't work for some reason.



This is not a substitute for good backups, but it might help in cases where your backup is several days old. Working out of DropBox as other people are suggesting is a good plan, though I've never actually used their file version system for cases like this where a 'good' file is overwritten by a bad one.

[Dadalus]

A quick thought on backups, has anyone else used the Grandfather, Father, Son approach?

A quick explanation is here.

Essentially you keep 3 backups,daily,weekly and monthly then rotate each backup. It's a system thats very easy to implement, and can save a lot of hassle when things go wrong.