Don't you hate it when...

[Claxon]

You discover that at some point in the last 4 years, you've accidentally deleted your best (and only one worth showing) game demo?

That's what happened to me just today. I've been wanting to shift over to console / pc programming again (away from these god forsaken mobile phones), and earlier this week one of my old colleagues told me that a certain company is looking for programmers with C++/DirectX experience, and that I should send in a CV if I was interested. Logically I sent it to him, and he asked me for any C++ demo's, so when I got home today I started trawling through my 3 hard disk drives, with over 800GB of storage space between them, hunting for the last big C++ & DirectX game I did (one which I'd spent time cleaning up, specifically to be used as my demo for job apps). Imagine my disappointment when all I find is some old zip files with about 5 months of work missing, in the directory where the latest build should have been...

I believe only 2 words can sum up that moment... EPIC FAIL

Anyway, I've got to remember everything about DirectX and C++ that has been buried by years of Java, PHP, C# and the various proprietary scripting languages that I've had to use since then, and make a demo by next week.

Learn from my example... Never delete anything, ever! (and yes, it was on an on-line source control site when we did it, but I had to cancel that a couple of years ago).

[EvilLlama]

oh wow that sucks majorly. Good luck though. Chances are, the new one you pull out of your butt might wind up being 10x better than the old one anyway. Hopefully.

[Sina Jafarzadeh]

Originally Posted by Claxon

it was on an on-line source control site when we did it

This implies that more than one person have worked on it and it may sound silly but you know that people sometime oversee the obvious. Have you asked the other(s)?

[ronnoc10]

Originally Posted by Sina Jafarzadeh

This implies that more than one person have worked on it and it may sound silly but you know that people sometime oversee the obvious. Have you asked the other(s)?

Or that someone else may have downloaded it.

[Claxon]

Alas the only version the others had is the old (buggy) one from before the code cleanup. Also because I was the sole programmer in the team, the others never bothered to download the actual source, only the actual game files.

I'd imagine that the new one will be cleaner than the old game, but it's going to be a fairly rushed job, which is never a good thing. If anything though, it should at least get me started on the foundation for demo's that I can use in future job applications.

[myfourtwofour]

That really is a sucker - good luck with deciphering a way to retreive it!

[Gshonk]

Dang man that sucks. But it will be a good refresher and will make you more ready for the interview.

[Adrir]

Major Ouch!

Hope you'll be all geared up for the interview! Good luck!

[dmcgraw]

Ouch... Well, at least you learned a critical lesson. Backup. Backup. Backup. (On several different sources). Really bad timing.

Good luck!