I am so fed up with this. I was so close to finishing my game, but the issues just continue and support doesn't know why. This is the latest setback that has happened to me. I was working on my game last night, and clicked save. Like it does many times for me BB crashed. Unlike other times when it would open up just fine afterwards, I opened my file to find that all my images were gone, and just the placeholders were there. I closed it and opened again, and now some were there, and others gone. Below are pictures of what happened. Has anyone seen this before? And yes, I have already emailed them to Sean at support. I uninstalled the software completely from my PC and reinstalled it, and my levels still look like a piece of Swiss cheese, with some assets present, and others just gone.
@Perry I feel you, honestly you have no idea how devastating this too happened to me Well the good news for me since then was I had to create the scenes again and this time, for every new scene added, I save as a incremental names
Sorry that happened to you. I do not know why BB crashed and burned but as a precaution, you should save frequently while working on it to multiple places. That's what I do.
I shouldn't have to do that though. Especially with a game with over 100 levels, that would mean I would have 100 save files. That is just ridiculous to have to do. Glad I am only in the trial version still and hadn't paid for it, other wise I would be more pissed off than I already am. A month of work just down the drain.
Do you only have one saved file? If yes, I can understand that this sucks big time. One month of work is too much to lose. I really hope you can get an additional month or two from the Buildbox team to remake the game. I wouldn't know what to do if I lost all my work in the final days of my trial. If you allow me to give you a tip as a professional (it won't help you with your lost work thou), for every major project you are working on, you ALWAYS should save to different places and in incremental steps. Professional applications do this automatically, normally with an auto-save feature and I hope Buildbox 2 will have it too. When I use Final Cut Pro, for example, the auto-saved files are going directly to my Dropbox cloud. If my main file gets corrupted or the drive dies, I always can get my work back. Make local backups often and/or use cloud backups like Backblaze or Crashplan (they make backups every 10 minutes). Another good way that was mentioned by another user here, is using an application like Forever Save. This makes incremental backups easy for applications that don't have this feature. It seems that Buildbox has a lot of glitches, but other software have them too. There is always the possibility a file gets corrupted or lost. It doesn't need to be the fault of the software or the OS, it also can be everything else like your computer gets stolen or your house burns down. Working in the digital world you have to protect yourself against situations like yours, at least in a professional environment. If you have work that takes more than some hours you should definitely consider it. I'm sorry you lost your work.
I do have two older versions saved, the most recent from 2 days ago, but have still lost countless hours of work. Not to mention level ideas that were thought of on the fly gone to long term memory. I have had issues with the software crashing from the beginning, many times when I would try to save. The whole experience has been very frustrating. Part of me wishes I had gone with another game development option when I was searching a month ago
personally I test layout and designs in temp build box files, then after I like something, open a clean bbdoc file (previous clean working file) and recreate the design, saving very often along the way. i try hard not to delete items in my production file as I've already fine tuned what I want inside the game by experimenting in the temp files.
@Perry I have been in your shoes. I have lost many many hours before I learned to make sure to save my project in iterations. Every day I save various new versions. By doing so you are guarding yourself against a crash and losing too much time. This is standard practice for any project using software. Just learn from this experience and be sure to save many iterations of any project you build. My current game that I just finished I must have close to 100 iterations. When I'm done I'll probably get rid of a bunch of them but they were necessary. Good luck with your future projects.
