Hey everyone,
This will be the last news post for Half-Life 2: Retaliation. Ever. We're finished.
I restored my computer last night due to virus and data corruption errors, and I had backed up all of my mod files, VMFs etc. to my email. At least I thought I did. When I went to re-download the files from my email, the attachments were not there. My heart stopped.
Everything is gone. The VMFs, pictures, map designs, everything. There is nothing I can do, and for that, I am everlasting sorry. I am sorry that all of you guys around the world will not be able to play this mod. I am sorry that I do not have the heart to continue and start over, as I feel I must dig myself a hole that is but the lowest depth of the world and stay there.
Sorry guys.
- Adrian
Well. It was fun while it lasted.
I... I just don't know. Really, this sucks. Are you sure you didn't back it up anywhere else? Flash drive? Hard drive? Man, I can't imagine how it feels to lose all of that work. It's a shame this never will come out, but I guess things happen like that. Good luck on anything else you do, because I'm sure it will be fantastic.
Damn, are you sure the process can't be reversed or did you completely bomb the drive? You could probably pay a professional to dig up the files from deep-memory...maybe.
What about that guy who wrote this preview article: Moddingtoday.com ? Do you suppose he hung onto his copy of the game? I mean it would be quite an outdated copy of the mod but still something to work with at least, assuming he still has his copy...
Not sure if I should post this. Being a former-betatester, I'm pretty sure the beta-test SVN still contains all files. Not the dev files and such, but it's files nontheless. They had pretty much completes several levels.
Oh damn...Maybe still there is some way out? Maybe they changed the email interface so that the files can be accessed but in a different way?
Or the mod team members have at least some part of the work left, that they've been working on?
Last time I checked, the emails could only hold 25 mb max. Maybe that happened.
this a commen problem under modders, each modder probebly will loose parts of a project or even a whole project. see it as something to learn from, even when it is so painfull that it takes out the fun of modding for a (hopefully short) while.
i myself did loose for the same reason about 8 years ago 4 massive fully finished sp-maps, (that i made with Sof2). from that time on i make sure that i have everything backed up twice (!!). because you can't be sure with this one backup, as is proven by your story.
personaly i upload everything to a friend of mine, and i upload it to a free upload site. in this case you simply can't loose stuff anymore.
what HEVcrab said is a good advice, maybe you still can get everything back, lets hope you can. and if not, then i feel for you, i know how much this hurts!!
success,
Leon
edit;
can't you get that beta back from Moddingtoday.com, maybe they still have it. then you can go on from there, the bsp files you can decompile back in to vmf's?
I'm not trying to have a go at you personally, and believe me I empathise, but you backed everything up as attachments in emails? You can get 1TB external hard drives for around £60 now. Higher end flash drives can hold 30GB. You should always have two proper backups. Email attachments are not proper backups.
Modders just seem to do this all the time. They either back it up somewhere dumb or not at all. I swear this is the third mod in two months that I follow that have closed down because they lost it all and hadn't properly backed it up.
Seeing how he was doing it because of viruses and other things, it's likely that he was desperate. And when you are desperate, you do things the wrong way. For any modders out there, use dropbox.
I'm truly sorry to read of this projects misfortune. It's a serious bitch Joker, but most all the important lessons we learn through the years are. Persevere and get on to the next one...
Oh crap that's terrible...
This very same thing happened to my first mod, HL2: Retribution. I did have a few files floating around on an older HDD, but it wasnt nearly enough to start over on.
So, what I did was take a few of the VMFs I still had that were suitable to my 2nd Mod, and retexture/rebuild them for NovaCor.
So maybe you could use some parts of whatever you find lurking and use that as a jumping off point for your next Mod.
For now, Id say just enjoy some gaming and think about what comes next. You obviously have a passion for the work and are able to produce; it would be a shame to see that wasted.
Ugh, that's horrible! So much work wasted. Your mod team doesn't have any of the files they were working on either? Truly sorry.
Aww man, that's horrible. It was looking good. I just hope that one day you can start another project.
Damn, was looking forward to this... but sadly, it's never coming...... I feel sorry for you and your team.........
When Joker first told me about this I felt soooo bad... The entire project...just gone.
That's just horrible.
ITS NOT FAIR ITS NOT ******* FAIR, ******* HACKERS NUKE THEM ALLLLLLLL