Mission Editor Complete Capitulation

[Rex]

You know, I've been a user for 3 years and I've always been hugely supportive of DCS, but I'm so angry right now I can hardly see straight.

I just spent 3 hours creating a mission, and the last 2.5 hours of it were lost.  The damn thing crashed while I was placing text on it, making the file size of the mission 0 bytes?!  Why zero bytes?  I don't know, but the same thing happened a year ago, and the year before that.  Both times I forwarded my logs, but damn if that helped anything.  This was before the unfortunately-named "backup" feature, which I  assumed would protect me.

Well, it didn't.

At all.

I have one for every 5 minutes, starting 3 hours ago, and ending 2.5 hours ago.  Why is the last 5 minute backup 150 minutes ago?  

Who knows.

DCS is incredibly complex and I am amazed by what you guys have been  able to do. I've always been extremely sympathetic to bugs and realize their inevitability in a project of this scope.  These are zipped text files, though.  Zipped text files! I can write an app to save and compress XML files, and I'm a moron! These are basics.  Notepad-level stuff.   The foundation on top of which all other features are built.  Nothing else should be created until this one simple task can happen with 99.999999999999% reliability.  For crying out loud, why not use copy-on-write or SOMETHING that won't obliterate our efforts so spectacularly.

I hate pissing away so much time on a rare vacation day.  And once it's lost, it's gone, it's zero fun to recreate stuff you already created, because now you're pissed off, and won't have anywhere near the same level of patience and detail.

I just have to give up the mission-creating stuff.  It's really cool in theory, but unless you institute hourly external backups outside of DCS, well, even then you'll lose an hour, which is alot.  Damn.  Just damn.

 

[Grimes]

Assuming you ran the mission recently you might be able to find a recent version in C:\Users\<windowsUserName>\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS

Either with lastMissionTrack.trk file, missionName.miz, and even taking the ~XXXXXXXX files with no extension and building a miz file from those. 

[Exorcet]

Not a solution to your problem, but  a suggestion; I have no idea how DCS's backup system works. By the time it was made I had already been making my own backups because of a similar problem.

The save button might as well not exist for me, I always save as in the ME until finished, then go back and delete the old versions.

[cfrag]

As a rule of thumb (because DCS is so bad in this regard), I always create a copy of the miz before I start working in it. That way I at most lose a day's work. But it is always terrifying for me to use the 'save' button because I'm aware that I'm basically playing "Russian Roulette" with that save.

It's completely incomprehensible to me why ED, knowing about this shortcoming for years, have not implemented one of easiest and safest fixes that has been industry standard for decades: atomic saves. Atomic saves means that instead of simply overwriting the current mission file, ME first saves to a new file (with a temp name). Once this succeeds, it first renames the old miz file to another temp name, then renames the temp-named new miz to the correct file name, and after all that was successful, it finally and safely deletes the old file. This has the advantage that if your machine crashes while saving a file, you do not run the risk of losing the contents of both the old (last-saved) and new files. This is elementary stuff, and I find it somewhat disappointing to find that a company with so many obviously top-notch devs have dropped the ball on something this basic.

Please ED, have pity on your content developers!

Edited December 29, 2022 by cfrag

[TEMPEST.114]

11 hours ago, Rex said:

I have one for every 5 minutes, starting 3 hours ago, and ending 2.5 hours ago.  Why is the last 5 minute backup 150 minutes ago?  

Who knows.

Because it won't auto save regardless of timings IF YOU HAVE ANY RIGHT INSPECTOR WINDOW OPEN!!!!!

It's pathetic. It literally means that as you're working with units, groups, waypoints, triggers etc... NOTHING GETS SAVED. 

You have to close all that down and just see the map and THEN it will save at the next timing interval. 

I've been creating missions and scripting for about 3 months now and the problems / issues are mounting up to the point it's just not fun anymore. 

 

Set the auto save to 1 min, watch it count down in the top left corner of the mission editor, now open an inspector panel on the right, Watch as it gets to the 0 time and then flickers, restarts but doesn't save. Close the inspector panels and then notice it will resume and save. - You can verify this with the date/time stamp on the .miz in explorer. 

So all the time you're working - it's doing NOTHING.   Grrrrrrr

Edited December 29, 2022 by Elphaba

[Rex]

20 hours ago, Grimes said:

Assuming you ran the mission recently you might be able to find a recent version in C:\Users\<windowsUserName>\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS

Either with lastMissionTrack.trk file, missionName.miz, and even taking the ~XXXXXXXX files with no extension and building a miz file from those. 

Thanks very much.  Unfortunately, I didn't even get a chance to run it a single time.  I was really sweating the details and probably had another hour or two before it was ready to fly.

This is good advice in general, though.

20 hours ago, Exorcet said:

Not a solution to your problem, but  a suggestion; I have no idea how DCS's backup system works. By the time it was made I had already been making my own backups because of a similar problem.

The save button might as well not exist for me, I always save as in the ME until finished, then go back and delete the old versions.

Good idea.  mission1.miz, mission2.miz, mission3.miz, etc .... until finished, then clean up.