What a summer it has been.
I will always remember this summer. A wedding, a hard drive failure, a girlfriend, a promotion, a new computer, a broke new computer, being broke, a funeral, a fixed new computer, a mod lost, and a mod, at last, found.
At the beginning of August I had the FS2H Beta Demo finished, packed, and ready. Literally no sooner had I started writing the backup CD than my computer encountered the blue screen of death, something Windows XP says shouldn't happen. An hour later C-drive was no longer bootable, and all my attempts to access the drive showed that nothing was even on the drive anymore. And with that all my work over the summer was gone.
A week later I dished out some serious money and got a 10,000RPM hard drive, complete with dedicated heat sinks and fan assembly. Also, I got a backup drive, used exclusively to back up C Drive every 48 hours. And with that I ventured forth to see if there was anything I could do to get my game back.
Three computer experts later it was finally declared that my problems were the result of a combination of two things: A boot sector virus and one bad RAM stick. Together they caused the cataclysmic crash and loss of data, but with the help of partition recovery and file recovery programs, I have been able to successfully recover much of my old FS2H work! It is a long process, however, and it took me a whole week just to recover enough files to even run the game again.
All of this happened at a time when I was dealing with the death of my uncle, the announcement of a new cousin on the way, and the wedding of another cousin. Crazy, crazy times.
But I am still here.
And this mod is still here.
And by the end of next week, so will the Beta test of this mod.
I've decided to go ahead and get some honest play-testing in. The models are not complete, and the texturing is far from over. The missions are still being recovered from my other hard drive, and some of the sounds are still not working correctly. But I think it is long overdue that someone other than myself got to play around with this mod.
Over the next week I'm going to be packing the game up in a nice not-so-little exe file and finding some space to host it. I'm going to try and get as much data recovered as I can before then, but I'm going to have to just go with what I have at some point. I'm sorry that it will be but a shadow of its former self, but the gameplay is what is important. And I could really use some feedback before I finish out the first chapter and get an honest, polished release.
Thanks to everyone for hanging in there with me. It has been a trying Summer, but I'm looking forward to a glorious Fall and Winter.
Boot Sector Virus Writers ----->
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