Well it finally happened. I’ve been using computers for about 15 years now and today I lost my first group of files due to not backing up. I had the bright idea of reinstalling windows over the weekend as it was becoming quite slow and freezing for 10 seconds whenever I opened “My Computer” (you’d be surprised how often I do that).

I took a backup of my ‘depot’ directory of CIC and assumed that would be enough for me to copy over my fresh install of perforce. To cut a long story short, I needed to copy the database files as well, which are nicely placed in the root of the Perforce install directory so I didn’t even notice them. This wouldn’t have been an issue as I still had my latest copy of CIC on the ‘client’ area of my PC….or so I thought. When I formatted my drive with the perforce server on it, some of the files on the client space were also deleted. I’m unsure why this happened, but this meant my latest copy was now gone. Luckily I had made a backup about a week ago onto my memory stick so I’ve just spent the last few hours sifting through the cryptic Perforce history files trying to put back together the code I’ve done in the past week. Luckily there wasn’t a great deal, and I think it was worth it for the lesson it’s taught me in backing up. I’ve always kept multiple copies on multiple media of any work I’m doing, however for some reason I didn’t make a backup when formatting this time. Lets just say I’ve learnt my lesson and I’ll now be doing even more backing up.

In other news, I’ve been designing my AI system which I was going to start implementing today but will now put off until tonight or tomorrow. I’ve decided to go with an event driven system and I’m going to code it with the intention of making the AI system run in a different thread in the future. I decided, for debugging purposes mainly, it’s best to keep it in the same thread to begin with. I’m going to break up each ship to have each different section controlled by a different AI system. I really liked the way the priority system in my RTS worked so I’ll be implementing an updated version of that for most of the AI systems in CIC.

Civ IV is upon us. It’s been released in the US and is coming out here in Australia on the 3rd. After traveling half way around the world, my copy is currently on it’s way from Sydney to Brisbane, so I’m hoping I’ll have it tomorrow. It’s then up to me to juggle Civ and CIC time to make sure I get enough relaxing and work done for the final week of my holiday.