How to lose three hours 'work'

Loser · #1 August 25th, 2003, 12:24 AM

So there I am, diligently working away at my Adamant009 turn which, for various reasons, takes me about three hours. I click End Turn, reassure it that, Yes I do want to end my turn, and I get a "Cannot create file..." error! Ack!

Back up about two hours for the event that led to this, or a few months for the reason that event was possible. I decided a few months ago to clean up my local, 9 gigabyte hard drive. So I moved everything I could to the file server on my little home network. I tried moving SE IV onto the network drive and, lo and behold, it runs fine: Mod Picker works, PBW works, everything. It takes a bit more to get it started, but I notice no other problems.

So today, about an hour into my turn, WinAmp cuts audio and flips down to the end of its list and SE starts telling me it can't find files. Turns out the file server rebooted itself... And it will boot up and serve files, after a minute or two, without intelligent intervention, so there's no telling how long this has been happening.

Well, the server comes back up, WinAmp can find the songs, Space Empires stops yelling at me, and I finish my turn out... Then the yelling starts up again, but with reversed flow.

So much hatred, so little communication.

I played with SE for a while, trying to get it to write that file across the network. I played with XP, but XP didn't have any trouble reading from or writing to the network. I restarted the server while XP was hibernating (I do hibernate the system a lot so I can play a turn over a couple days). Eventually SE just goes away, taking around three hours work and half an hour of frustration with it.

Time to move SE back onto the local machine, I'm thinking. Those 375 megabytes won't kill me, now that I told XP not to use a 1.5 gigabyte swap file. Funny thing is, when I checked the size of the Space Empires folder across the network it said the 'file size' was around 375, but the 'size on disk' was 12.8 gigabytes or so. I'm going to chalk that one up to the proximity or Mars and move on...

[ August 25, 2003, 12:24: Message edited by: Loser ]