A cry for help...

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If anyone knows WAD file structure very well and could take a look at a file I have, I would be most grateful. It's a large episode (9 big levels, and damn good fun if I may say so myself) I made for the Aliens TC back in '96, managed to find it on a disk at the back of a cupboard this morning, but the main WAD file is corrupted.

Doom ignores it completely, and loading it up in the various WAD editors gives a bunch of errors...though they do recognize it as a WAD file, the entries are all garbled (I'm hoping it's just a few bytes mixed up in the headers, that can be recognized and fixed... probably no such luck, but worth a try).

Do they crash upon loading the file, or f-up when you try to modify or compile the level?

doesn't sound like it's recoverable.
if you like you can send it to my e-mail address and I'll have a look.

Amanichen said:

Do they crash upon loading the file, or f-up when you try to modify or compile the level?

Haven't tried loading it in a Level editor, just WAD tools (NWT etc). Looking at it in NWT I would guess that a level editor wouldn't even be able to load it, or at least would be totally screwy.

Anyway, I've uploaded it here, it's about a 300KB zip file:

http://www.happyhappy.freeserve.co.uk/stuff/ADoomEp2.zip

I'll see if there's something i can do. If it will load up in a wad editor sometime's it's as simple as compiling it again, and running an integrity check from the editor.

One tip:

With all of your wads, it's a really good idea to back them up by taking screenshots, edit them in a imaging program and text label the sectors with about ceiling and floor heights, and lighting values and textures (etc.)

So if you spend 3 months on an extremely detailed submarine wad like i did, and it gets screwed up, you can rebuild it without too much hassle--just alot of time.

Amanichen said:

With all of your wads, it's a really good idea to back them up by taking screenshots

Er, why not back it up by sending it to a friend, disk, ftp, cd?

Because this was 5 years ago, I had a 9600 baud modem that cost about $3 a minute and no CD-ROM drive.

Anyway, for anyone who is interested 'loser' has done some work on it and uploaded the partially reconstructed file to

http://wadedit.50megs.com/reconst.html

That is from another thread about this at
http://www.doomworld.com/forums/editing/messages/10881.shtml

i examined the wad file a bit but it looks like the main wad directory is missing or corrupted. sorry but i think you're screwed :(

I've found another WAD file that seems to be a slightly earlier version (by a few days) of the first - it's also similarly corrupted, so is probably a result of the same crash.


So, for anyone interested in taking a look at it...

http://www.happyhappy.freeserve.co.uk/stuff/AEp2old.zip


It might be a close enough version that data from one can be used in the other, maybe they will have different parts corrupted.. who knows? :)