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I had the mother of all weird-ass errors last night. As luck would have it, it happened at 4 am. :D

So there I was, politely cursing away at the Endless Saga texture manager for not working properly. Rebuild, nothing, tweak, rebuild, nothing, tweak, rebuild, nothing, crash, tweak, rebuild, nothing... You have no idea how furiously a programmer can program when faced with a situation like this.

Around 4, it came to a halt. Rebuild, nothing, tweak, rebuild, nothing, tweak, rebuild, works. ...YAY! FAZAM! PC reboots. Woah. No good. Nothing comes on and motherboard begins beeping non-stop. WOAH. NO GOOD. I shut off the PC and looked up the mobo's manual: the beeping meant it couldn't recognize my system memory anymore. Wow. That's bad. Well, only one way to fix it: go to bed.

Around 7:30 am, I wake up and try booting the PC again. "beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep-" Damn. Damn damn. Well that's no good. I crack open the case, blow around in there, carefully push on the RAM to make sure it's properly seated, and boot. "...Beep!" ...Yay. Whew. Thank god it works. :)

Windows greets me with an error message: the system recovered from a serious crash. Oh? Good grief, when'd that happen? I click on the appropriate button to have more info and it takes me to a website stating that my sound card was at fault. Huh? How the hell is that possible? Well, the link to my card's manifacturer's site mentionned potential crashes if some driver weren't installed, so I installed it. Things ran fine (though my sound is terrible now...) until I fired up Endless Saga and tried to compile.

Immediately after hitting F7, Windows informs me that I'm out of virtual memory and that it has increased the swap file's size. Woah, how the hell? But it's time to go to work, so I shut the PC down and head off, feeling slightly troubled.

After getting home, I boot and mess around. Nothing seems to be wrong. I fire up ES and compile- WHAM. Out of virtual memory the INSTANT my finger touches F7. And a host of weird unidentified compiler errors. I stare, shocked. Well... programmer reference manual #924 taught me how to handle this situation: delete build files, rebuild from scratch. Which I do. After some minor problems with files behaving strangely, I rebuild ES and see Ezekiel's hooded face staring at me, taunting, as if to say, "that's what you get for messing up the texture manager!"

Weird, eery, and not very reassuring. ;) So far, absolutely nothing seems wrong. I tested my RAM, it passed all tests fine. I ran an AV check, nothing was found (given that I don't download warez or blindly click everything that I see, that's not really surprising.) Spyware? I'm a prudent IE user and know well enough how to deal with security settings: nothing there as well (save for a stray cookie). Even a few HD checks and OS integrity checks turned up nothing.

I can only say this: in the midst of the darkest, latest of coding hours, a demon child was born. When compiled, it would bring any system to its knees and cause harmless yet terrifying problems. ES's source code will forever be haunted... woe to any programmer who'll do late-night debugging...

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Haha. Good story. You'll have to see if it does it again tonight.
Call Ghostbusters, if it does.

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You know. I think you're a very special unit.

NO! IT CAN'T BE TRUE! IT'S TOO SHOCKING!!!

Seriously though, you're lucky you can actually fix this sorta thing... Way back when, we ended up having the same beeping thing on our old PC, my parents ended up freaking out and bought a new one, not that I minded

And by the way, Endless Saga's looking great!

This post has been edited by Lionfart on 16th June 2005 02:25

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Oh noes! Teh MSN Space!

Oh I know I would've been freaking out and losing all sense of rational thought. I know the first thing I would've done after it compiled again was back up like crazy.

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This is my world: (Got my second chapter up, 3rd Chapter about 80% complete)
http://www3.sympatico.ca/daniel876/homepage.html

Actually, I backed up as soon as I could the PC to boot again. I have a lot of backup versions to rollback to, but nothing past the point where I implanted my rather kick-ass texture manager.

The ironic thing is, if I would have restored from that backup of the project as it currently was, since it only had source code and no precompiled material, everything would've run fine.

I've been toying around with tweaking maps and so far, my PC hasn't violently detonated.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Ouch. How far did that problem go? It's a good thing you managed to recover it at any rate, as I'm sure you would be pondering suicide if you didn't manage the computer Oh, well...

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"Fire and steel
follow me through the lands
you will burn hordes of hell
in the deadly raging flames of revenge"

Rhapsody - Flames of Revenge

Really, it wasn't anything too serious from what I can tell. I managed to complete the texture manager last night (again, at 4 am.) I'm damned proud of it, too: works like a charm and manages resource allocations very well. My PC had yet to go haywire on me, but every recompile sent a chill down my spine.

So long as I can keep coding, it's all good, anyways.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."