I have been working on my "Quest For Glory, A Hero's Death" for almost a year now. It has come along very nicely, and is quite huge at the moment. I recently ran into a BIG problem... I had a hard disk failure and had to install a brand new HDD with a complete reinstall of my OS and everything else. As such, my AGS files, including the 200+ megs of data for my game, are gone! :(
I tried hooking the HDD up as a secondary drive to browse it and see if I can pull any files off, but unfortunately, the drive won't spin. It is dead. I am now stuck with the fact that I only have the most recent compiled .EXE file and NONE of the source code, graphics, etc, etc that I had done. Does anyone have any idea if it is possible to decompile my most recent .EXE file to give me all my source stuff back?
Any help appreciated.
Thanks,
Bill
what version of ags were you using?
Try leaving the defunct harddisk to a service shop. They might be able to help you.
I upgraded a while back to 2.62.
I am an IT person. I work for a computer company, and did all the normal diagnostic stuff I could do. It is indeed dead, appears to have seised up somehow.. Maybe overheating, I dunno... We have a vendor I can send it to, but it costs hundreds to thousands of dollars to pull data from a dead/damaged HDD. That is not something I am willing to do.
Up to some AGS version around before 2.5 the game data could still be extracted from the exe with a program CJ had, but nowdays the stuff is coded hard enough so that nothing brings it backwards... You can maybe get the text messages, sprites and bg's back with ResHack or something, but I don't know about scripts and room data...
It is possible for me to extract all your sprites from the exe, but as of v2.5 and later it's not possible to recover any of the game scripts.
Obviously it's a bit late for this now, but I'd always recommend burning a CD backup at least once a month of any important work. Hard drive failures are all too common :(
Fortunately, lost code is probably a lot easier to recreate than lost sprites. I find that programming a task is a lot like playing an adventure game. It takes you a long time the first time you go through it, then subsequent times it's dead easy.