Doom Projects you regret having lost due to a hard disk failure or mistake

[Optimus]

Strange subject I open but there is something I sometimes remember and it hurts. It wasn't big, it was just very nicely done. It was even during 1996 when I was 16 years old.

I was playing with DMAUD and DMGRAPH and that stuff. I decided to render a shinny UFO on 3D Studio V4.0 on my 386 and few more death frames and use it as a replacement for the Cacodemon. Good thing, because the UFO is symmetric and looks the same from all angles, I didn't need to render more stuff except from five death frames and a firing frame where I added more light in front. The death animation was the UFO crashing and becoming garbage and a sign popping up saying ROSWELL. It was better than I thought and the conversion was good, not loosing the shinniness I had achieved. I had even added additional sounds, when the UFO appeared an echoed deep voice saying "Die Earthling" and some death sound too I can't recall.

So, I enjoyed play doom with this replacement for few days and then decided that maybe I should search on the internet where I can upload my replacement. I even did a batch file which replaced every sprite of the caco, long list, writting too much. Then I use PKUNZIP to make this an archive, and so when I finish I say "Ok,. now I have everything packed the archive, let's delete the files, I don't need them anymore". Big mistake, for some reason the PKUNZIP malfunctioned and I had a ZIP file of size something like 700 bytes. Didn't I know of undelete then? Was I so naive???

That was so good especially thinking I was only 16 and I produce far more shitty stuff nowadays :)

So, this thread is about your stories of wasted Doom material by stupid mistake or other reasons that you regret now.

[Foodles]

My first maps for doom, made in doom2 format - undoubtedly awful but useful for comparisons and nostalgia. Also the first 5 levels of my 7 level ZDoom project which i remember at the time thinking it was the best thing ever - it featured lots of hudmessages from "Captain" and "Bravo Team" as well as lots of ripped textured and recoloured monsters. Still I remember how proud I felt after figuring out how to create animated textures and a green key in slumped.

[Mechadon]

Same as Foodles. I was making a 4 or 5 map episode for my own enjoyment, and I think I had finished 3 maps in total. Then I think I got bored and forgot about them, and at some point in the future the hard drive had to be reformatted. So I lost those maps along with some other older maps. The oldest one I have left is this and I'm pretty sure it was the last map I worked on for that episode.

Incidentally I still have the hard drive where my old maps were stored and I tried to see if they were recoverable about a year ago. I didn't have any luck though, but I'm not sure the tools I used were really that good either.

[Enjay]

A Star Wars TC I did for Heretic. I thought it was pretty good. The magical weapons (modified with a HHE patch) reskinned well as blasters etc, the enemies worked well too and I did some acceptable levels including one with a little battle that took place between the legs of an AT-AT.

It was lost as a result of a computer change and a bit of carelessness and some corrupt floppy disks. :/

[DeathevokatioN]

I've had tons of close calls of nearly losing a years work, including my computer getting struck by lightning, my flash disk breaking and temporally repairing it to get that last breathe of air so that I could quickly save my work onto my hard drive, reformatting my computer etc, it must be heartbreaking to lose all that hard work. I think I'd cry. :(

[DooMAD]

Haven't lost any projects myself yet (touch wood), but I still wonder what would have been if Toxicfluff's sidescrolling platformer project Doomsplat hadn't been mostly lost. Think it was a HDD failure. Looked like it would have been awesome.

[Khorus]

A strife map I made in 2006.

No loss, it wasn't very good.

[Dutch Doomer]

I still regret removing all my first maps that I made. At the time I didn't knew they had some sort of nostalgic importance. I just thought they were crap, well they were, but they were my first efforts, and thats what made them special.

As for my recent projects that I don't have anymore. I don't regret deleting those, I allready knew it wouldn't be any good in the end.

[TwinBeast]

I lost various textures, sound effects and 3d models due to hdd failure. I guess I lost some map or two as well. I think I was a bit sad about the textures and sound effects.. they were pretty good, probably the sound effects could still be useful as they were mostly these ambient sounds that could have been used in pretty much any project. But whatever, maybe if I could listen to them now, I would notice they have too much noise as I didn't have a good microphone when I recorded the sounds.

Well, at least it taught me to always backup my important stuff.

[printz]

Enjay said:

A Star Wars TC I did for Heretic. I thought it was pretty good. The magical weapons (modified with a HHE patch)

And now you can't recreate it because HHE is an outdated concept, and an official Star Wars shooter (Dark Forces) exists, which does everything at Star Wars better than Doom. Bummer.

Strangely enough, all my first Doom wads continue to live, through the help of various web servers. But the WIP ones are cryptic as fuck and it's hard to evolve them without ruining the childish spontaneity.

OK. Here's one. It was a ZDoom (later MBF) Dehacked modification which was based on a myth I had created as a child. It was about an immortal monster made of stone and lava who threatened the fate of mankind (in one of the story arcs, he was rumoured to having "killed God").

The story was like a typical FPS -- you, a player-controlled soldier, remained the lone survivor of the home base (except you had a radio to tell you objectives), and had to find a rare syringe to inject into the Monster -- the only thing that can harm him. The effect of the syringe was to cause the Monster to rapidly age and become decrepit until he has only one day to live, moment when he'll just commit suicide on the subway railway. After that, his secret creator (a bald bearded guy like Szandor LaVey) will collect his remains (weak like clothes due to age) and continue to perform experiments... Decades later, the monster will reincarnate and return, in the form of two separate halves (power and spiritual), a bit weaker but not by much.

The loss wasn't tragic because all I had was a no-graphics ZDoom Dehacked modification with only his second-in-command as big boss. But now I intend to make a Doom 3 map where you're trapped in a maze inside the monster. Also based on one of my childhood's imaginations.

What the hell--- now I have the means to finally make it alive. But first let's see how to implement it. Which would be easier... Eternity or Doom 3?

[Marnetmar]

One of my first WADs was just called 1.wad, and I lost it due to a HDD crash. It's a shame because even if I'm bragging, the levels played really really well.

[darkreaver]

I once made a whole 32 level megawad. It was comparable to AV and Scythe, only a little better in all aspects. I lost it due to someone stealing my computer. This was back in early 1995.

[printz]

darkreaver said:

I once made a whole 32 level megawad. It was comparable to AV and Scythe, only a little better in all aspects. I lost it due to someone stealing my computer. This was back in early 1995.

Either you're joking, or you're so good you can churn out a megawad as good as that. I dare you.

[fraggle]

A year or so ago I spent a couple of weeks disassembling the DWANGO executables, with the idea of writing a new DWANGO server. It would then be possible to run DWANGO/Vanilla Doom in DOSbox and play over the Internet using DOSbox's modem emulation.

I got it to the point where you could "dial up", log in successfully, the lobby would come up and you could write messages that would be echoed back to you. Unfortunately the SSD on my netbook died and I lost the lot of it.

printz said:

And now you can't recreate it because HHE is an outdated concept,

Chocolate Heretic supports it.

[printz]

fraggle said:

Unfortunately the SSD on my netbook died and I lost the lot of it.

Apparently SSDs are to stay away from, for now? You're not the first poster with bad news about these.

[chungy]

If you were to stay away from technology because failure does happen, then boy you should avoid just about everything. SSDs are a rather mature technology; some manufacturers make them poorer than others. Mechanical hard disks are no different in this regard.

[188DarkRevived]

I'll speak on behalf of Darkhaven... There's no doubt that he regrets giving his old laptop to his cousin who deleted all of his resources for the X-DOOM project back in 2005. We could've released an awesome megawad based on the original blueprints of Tom Hall's "Doom Bible", containing the legendary Unmaker weapon and all that other scrapped stuff.
Fortunately, the single map which I was contributing to that group project was safely preserved on my own laptop, and I released it separately for the ZDOOM port under the title of Meretricious Plunge back in either 2006 or 2007.
But damn, would've been better to have the finished megawad, but Darkhaven lost his motivation upon the data loss incident and decided to start other projects instead of reviving X-DOOM :(

[Snakes]

There were at least 3 completed layouts for Into Hell lost when my comp got one wicked virus. Instead of redoing everything, I shrugged and released what I had finished. They were a product of a time where I could churn out layouts every three or four days and a map a week.... Those were the days indeed.

Several ideas from those maps would later be recycled and put to use when I made Map27 for Doom 2 Unleashed.

[Phobus]

I've deleted and lost a lot of stuff over time, but thinking about it, the only thing I particularly miss is the WIP I made of TakeOver back in... 2007? I know it was one of many .WADs I discontinued and deleted around about that time because they were quite grand concept and I'd get bored of working on them (particularly if they involved sprite work).

Saying that, TakeOver was largely succeeded spiritually (they both drew inspiration from a largely similar checklist) by Coils of the Twisted Tale (which is probably my best .WAD to date) and Justice - Infernal Mechanics, which made use of the resources I'd put together but cut out all of the conceptual grandness and really impressive ZDoom features.

Things I miss most of all from it are:

-The "active volcano" which had hot air currents, sparks and ash blowing around in it. Lose your footing (or jump) and the wind would throw you off into the lava, resulting in an instakill. Get to the centre and you could teleport to hell.
-The extremely complicated and horrendously-written interactive computer system scripts, which did all sorts of things in the first map, including setting up a platforming puzzle that I saw in Metroid Prime 2 involving low gravity and stacks of crates.
-A fun little script set up to use a load of sound clips from that old Aliens Doom I have to have some radio chatter at the start of the level, which falls silent over time as you realise you're on your own. (I intend to reproduce this for my next Tiny Pack)
-A scripted section where the player could climb across some monkey bars over a vat of nukage to reach a Munchkin-infested vent and continue

[fraggle]

printz said:

Apparently SSDs are to stay away from, for now? You're not the first poster with bad news about these.

Nope. I'm going to refrain from jumping to conclusions. Regardless, it's my own fault for keeping the work on a single computer; exactly the same thing could have happened if it was on a hard drive.

[printz]

I've had more mobo failures than of hard drives, that's why I was asking...

[Malinku]

I've only lost like 3-4 map. the only one I would like to have back was a duel map I made.

I still have the first map I every made.

[Kirby]

This, among other things when my first laptop got stolen :( I even had a map for ZPack in the works which got swept away with all that. *sigh*

Good reminder to get stuff off my old hard drives and keep copies in more places

[Jimmy]

I've only lost a massive documentation for my STForums2 project in a HD failure - I'd written all sorts of things I was going to do, map-wise, script-wise, and plot-wise for the whole thing. That effectively killed the project even without me losing any of the actual work I'd done on it. :(

However, I've lost a number of maps (MAP13 of Jenesis nearly fell victim to this) to either my mapping tool or lump editor (I'm honestly not sure which) but it's happened a number of times - the map just disappears without a friggin' trace. Only happens once a year or so but it's terrifying when it does, simply because I've got no idea what I did wrong.

[Technician]

I've never had a hard dick failure, I can assure you. But I had corrupted a map I was building from a crash. Thank God for doom builder's automatic backups.

[Stupid Bunny]

I actually got very lucky with this. I was making a 4-5 map megawad and had two maps done and one largely finished, when my hard disk completely fucked out. I would have lost two or three months of work had it not been for the fact that I had put them onto a flash drive only about a week beforehand. Thus, no real progress was lost and the maps have been in the works since then

My hard drive then crashed a second time, also a week before final exams/papers were due, but again I got lucky and lost little work. I now have three maps done and two more in the works.

I now save the maps into Dropbox, in the knowledge that this will probably happen again before the semester is over.

[hex11]

I lost all my early maps in 1996, when my HD failed. It didn't completely die, but there were enough bad sectors that I lost a ton of data. Only one of those maps was any good though, so it's no great loss. But when I got a newer disk, I allocated all of it to Linux instead of keeping a small DOS partition for dual boot. Then I stopped mapping because DEU wasn't as easy as DCK or EdMap, but now (after getting familiar with Yadex) I realize that was a mistake and I should have stuck with it.

[lupinx-Kassman]

What I have lost was worth losing.

[fraggle]

Found a couple of screenshots:

[GreyGhost]

Technician said:

I've never had a hard dick failure, I can assure you.

What's your secret - viagra?

I tend to replace drives before they've had a chance to fail and backup stuff at intervals, so no tales of woe from me - at least not yet.