Getting over the rage

[Matt_D]

You've all been there, just spent a good while drawing a scene and it's going well, it looks great, you're dead pleased. You add a new layer just about to finish up with a tint and a save then VOMP the piece of ---- graphics program freezes, and dies, and of course there's no rescue.

Now, how do you stay motivated?

[Watercolorheart]

I save multiple files of my format for next time, you know, backing it up as I work ... if I ever plan to do a major inking, I've learned to save or back up the sketch first. Flash LOVES to crash on complex uses of the pen tool that I loved to abuse.

Uh ... I usually go get a bowl of ice cream, sulk, rant and complain at someone, and start over again later.

The hardest thing I ever had to do was backwards-decompile an SWF. My FLA for the animation corrupted, and all my heirachies were gone. I literally had to copy and paste each and every frame ... for 300 frames of animation. I was ready to pull my hair out.

[Glasskitten]

I am probably not qualified to answer such a question, because (a) I never actually do stay motivated and (b) I often fail to follow my own advice...but I must second the recommendation to save, all the time, in every way, shape, and form imaginable. Computers are out to get us, and the most reliable weapon I know of is the save.

[papillon]

PSP used to love to crash on me. I'm pretty good about saving now and tend not to lose TOO much work, although it bloats my hd having to save everything in layers in case of crash.

If I get really unlucky and lose a long stretch of work, I take a break and come back another day. If I try to do it over right away I will be angry and do a crappy job of it.

[SolarSnake]

The best thing to do is to find some old Sierra games. King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest.. one of those. Or, preferably, several of those.

Play them for a bit.

There's nothing like a Sierra game to teach you to say every 30 seconds. It's been a long time since I last played one and I still save very 45 seconds or so. Regardless of whether you're talking about fiction, programming, image manipulation...

Sierra games are the best training you can ever get for saving like you want your control and s keys to wear out.

(Btw, I'm sorry to hear about your loss.)

[Matt_D]

yes, but when I'm actually drawing something and in the vibe I don't remember such things until I'm done. See I can bash a half decent (for me) image out in half hour for smaller pics an hour for the bigger ones, but when you've just about finished something that you actually think *yeah that's looking good, I'll just finish it up* and then it crashes.

Trying to make the pic all over again is a chore ¬.¬ and takes twice as long and never looks as good. But you can't not recreate the pic becouse you need it for the scene ¬.¬.*shakes fist at his substandard replica*

The worst data loss I ever had whilst making a game was a game called Bloodkult written in DIV 1, I'd made about six vast image databases so I could just pull Maps together. One day in a fit of rage I erased the machine.... including the database files. Suffice to say I never finished that game.

At the moment me and the gimp are at odds, ¬.¬ O well I've ranted grrd and replaced, all is well in Matt land again luckily it was just a strip as opposed to a whole image.


woah and by the time I finish the post there are like 5 more erck

lol I need to find some old games, I was gonna download all the amstrad titles the otherday hmmm.

ahh dammit I just noticed the slashes are the wrong way around in the new picture *sigh*

[monele]

Use CTRL+S as often as possible (or whatever shortcut the Gimp has).
Save in multiple files (whenever you reach a big step, Save As in a new file).
Backup these files, preferably twice : send them through e-mails to a web account... keep them on web space if you have some... keep them on floppy disks or zip disks or usb keys... burn them on cds along with other stuff when there's space left... copy them to another hard drive if you have one.

I don't see any other way ^^;

[SolarSnake]

"I don't see any other way ^^;"

Version control software, such as subversion.

Check everything that you're working on it. Every time you do something major, commit the new version. It's less work than renaming.

Granted, being a programmer I just have subversion lying around anyway, so it's trivially more work to add all of the creative stuff that I do into it. (And I'm not an artist so I don't do hi resolution graphics; my graphical work is only passable quality icons and knitting patterns, but subversion efficiently handles large binary objects anyway.)

[Watercolorheart]

Or you can do what I do if you want to save on file space have one named file1.PSD and file2.PSD or whatever and swap back and forth. It's simple, easy, and if one goes, you always have the other one.

[lordcloudx]

what I do kinda like BCS is to save a copy of the original scanned and traced lineart apart from the other file that I actually plan to add colors and shading to.

and then ctrl+s, ctrl+s every time I finish tracing over one part or even just filling in one area with color. (kinda slows down the computer after awhile though, or maybe I'm just using an outdated machine.