LW is corrupting my files...again

[cesario1212]

I was working on a scene file all day. The whole day never saw a clitch from LW, not even a minor "I'm thinking real hard" clog. I shut my computer down, and came back the next day and BAM, as I load the scene file I get a message over the load screen that says "Error: Items cannot be parented to themselves."

First, I'm like WTF! I was moving guys yesterday, I didn't parent anything to anyone. And if I had, I should have gotten some kind of error message at the time telling me I couldn't do that, no?

Second, my jaw drops when I see what it has done to my scene...my bones are in shambles, my guys are gone, and everything was either unparented from each other (including all the skeletons), or parented in the most unimaginable places possible.

I've quickly purused through the scene file in a text editing program, and couldn't find much out of the ordinary. But it's a very large scene file and I'm not much for code.

Any suggestions folks? I could really use them.

Art-man

P.S. If anyone from Newtek reads this, stop upgrading LW with new features all the time and for once, give us an upgrade with REAL stability (cross platform!!)! I'm tired of all the bells and whistles that are merely smoke since the program is known to be as bad as ZIP disks for corrupting files. (what's the point of the fancy stuff if the core isn't working right, huh? >:[ )

[toby]

make sure that your scene is not accessing files outside your chosen directory -

If while working on your scene you import something from another directory, it will work fine until you re-load that scene - LW will then look for that object or image in the current directory and can get confused

Are you on mac or pc?

[papou]

maybe, ur Disk was full.

[asmith47]

As I work on a scene, and before I do any major changes, I always save it with a new name, for example

testscene1.lws
testscene2.lws
testscene3.lws

and so on. This way it things get fouled up I can go back a couple of versions and at least haven't lost all work.

[cesario1212]

Depends, in the lab I use PC's, but I'm currently working at home, so I am using a G4 Mac with OS X.2

I'll see if any of your suggestions help to recover the file.

asmith47, I too save backups of my scene, but the scene version that is corrupted is rather much ahead of the others. The one day I don't make backups regularly, huh? :) I will admit I shot myself in the foot on that one to a degree.

Thanks. Later,

Art-man

[mattclary]

Can you post the scene so we can look at it?

[toby]

I don't suppose you're going from mac to pc with the scene - that would be the problem, the exact same thing happened to me - apparently you can edit the scene file in a text editor in a way that fixes the problem

[cesario1212]

I haven't been switching platforms lately, if that helps. However, the file was orginally created on a PC with WinXP.

Here is the scene file attatched. Have fun browsing it. I've moved on to a couple of other scenes while I work this baby out in my spare time.

Note: I've had to change the file extension so the bulletin would load it.

Thanks again all!

Art-man

[toby]

boy that is a mess.

I expect to see buckets of blood with that many bones piled up.

try opening it on a pc, try loading it into a fresh scene via "load items from scene"

I've seen "retro-active" problems before, tho not in LW, where a file will stop working, or act corrupted, but all your previously saved files act the same way!

that's all I can think of :^)

[cesario1212]

Yeah, when I do something, I do it right :), LOL.

Thanks for the help, I'll let you know if it works.

Art-man

[cesario1212]

I tried the load items from scene on the mac and that did not work.

Um...it may be a while before I can get to a PC with LW on it.

Art-man

[Skonk]

Try this one. Rename it back to .lws and try loading it(the txt file in the zip, dont rename the zip :)).

EDIT: actually it still wont work, just loaded it (without the objects ofcourse) and it still gives the parent to them selves error.

[cesario1212]

thanks for the try.

Thanks again all, despite our lack of luck.

Art-man