Has anyone attempted to resurrect their semi-abandoned work?

When I stopped working on my pet TC about a year and a half ago I left it in a semi-playable state. Work had to stop because we were moving and I had intense amounts of things to do in the real world, plus I had achieved significant progress in making my TC into a novel (which is going fine, thank you).

In the last couple of months, things have greatly settled down. We're moved in and settled. I now have semi-regular bouts of abundant time. Has anyone else restarted a semi-abandoned Total Conversion and met with anything but failure? I've thought long and hard, and I've always felt a little puny about all of the work that I've done and will never otherwise see the light of day.

Not that I expect anyone to remember, but KFL may be workable still. And, despite my predictions, the Nova scene has not died in the last few years. Should I bother?

@rmx256, on Jan 10 2008, 05:37 PM, said in Restarting attempts:

When I stopped working on my pet TC about a year and a half ago I left it in a semi-playable state. Work had to stop because we were moving and I had intense amounts of things to do in the real world, plus I had achieved significant progress in making my TC into a novel (which is going fine, thank you).

In the last couple of months, things have greatly settled down. We're moved in and settled. I now have semi-regular bouts of abundant time. Has anyone else restarted a semi-abandoned Total Conversion and met with anything but failure? I've thought long and hard, and I've always felt a little puny about all of the work that I've done and will never otherwise see the light of day.

Not that I expect anyone to remember, but KFL may be workable still. And, despite my predictions, the Nova scene has not died in the last few years. Should I bother?

3000tc was originally for EVO.... back when I was on a g3 powermac. Now, nearly 3 years later, I've begun work again using my old written notes (since Im on a PC and my old EVO versionwouldn't be any use at all... IF I could even find it. I think its doing well now... and its for Nova...

I have already succesfully resurrected a simi-dead TC. EVA (Escape Velocity Apophis.) but about 10 months ago, my computer (an old iMac G3.) started having memory issues, as the TC had gotten to a point that my computer could no longer hold it. so, i abandoned it temporarily, until i was able to get a better computer that would be able to take the strain. for about 4 months, EVA sat thus. than, before christmas, for my Birthday, i got a shiny new PowerMac dual Processor G4, with a gig of memory, and I was able to recommence my project.

for those of you who care.

Give it a try. Worst comes to worst, you might not release, but you still have some fun developing your ideas.

I recently had thoughts of trying to restart my previous efforts build a starcraft TC.

Unfortunately, the last work done on it was three-ish years ago, and the project files have long since made their way to the great /dev/null in the sky.

@rmx256, on Jan 10 2008, 03:37 PM, said in Restarting attempts:

When I stopped working on my pet TC about a year and a half ago I left it in a semi-playable state. Work had to stop because we were moving and I had intense amounts of things to do in the real world, plus I had achieved significant progress in making my TC into a novel (which is going fine, thank you).

In the last couple of months, things have greatly settled down. We're moved in and settled. I now have semi-regular bouts of abundant time. Has anyone else restarted a semi-abandoned Total Conversion and met with anything but failure? I've thought long and hard, and I've always felt a little puny about all of the work that I've done and will never otherwise see the light of day.

Not that I expect anyone to remember, but KFL may be workable still. And, despite my predictions, the Nova scene has not died in the last few years. Should I bother?

I'm going to assume you meant plug-in there...because as the community has so often pointed out...there are actually no successful TCs that have come to absolute completion (Polycon...okay okay, this is not meant to start an argument, but if you ask Pace even he says that Arpia 2 is a quasi-TC it adds to Nova, but doesn't completely replace it). Anyhow, I think you should go for it. Personally, I have been working the last year on sorting out my own real world "issues" of those the TC is number three (the first issue has been completed, the second is near completion, should be done by February sometime). I am a bit hobbled until I get a new computer I've been told to wait till the 15th for Apple to make some announcement, but I'll be working on the timeline and storylines till then. Next term I'm taking solid modeling, so I'll see if I can parlay some of that skill into ship design. One step at a time and before you know it (9 months from now) it will be done.

But hey, if you don't get it done, you can always kick yourself later. (Jking, good luck)

Swithich

You will always get people wanting to play your TC, especially one as big as KFL. No question. The only real question here is whether you want to or not.

@rmx256, on Jan 10 2008, 06:37 PM, said in Restarting attempts:

Has anyone else restarted a semi-abandoned Total Conversion and met with anything but failure?

Well, yeah, though not on the scale you're talking about....

First, there's SFA. It moved forward some when we picked it up, though nothing has happened since October. We'll see.

Second, there's my own quite small TC. I went back to it after a considerable hiatus recently, and I actually managed to get a new and significantly enlarged version released about a week ago. (Well, "limited release," anyway. Not really a beta -- more like a movie that's playing in a public but obscure test market.) The trick to getting that done was letting go of my most grandiose plans while making the best of the strengths of the material on hand -- in other words, I went back and incorporated ancient resources I'd made several years ago, tweaked the TC's storyline to make them fit, and concentrated on gameplay rather than coherence.

I say RealLife™ is the "problem".
Since end of September, I've been at uni again. And it was the busiest uni term I've ever had.
Now, after two weeks of Christmas "holidays" spent studying, I have exams until next Friday.
Before September, I had exams.

Basically, life is full of busy moments, and when you don't feel motivated enough to get some other kind of work done, your projects are put on hold.

Rik, if you want to work on Kemet again, do it. If you don't, forget about it. Be it for just a while, or permanently.

Real Life is the problem. Nova is the cure.

@guest_swithich_-, on Jan 11 2008, 05:33 AM, said in Restarting attempts:

I'm going to assume you meant plug-in there...because as the community has so often pointed out...there are actually no successful TCs that have come to absolute completion (Polycon...okay okay, this is not meant to start an argument, but if you ask Pace even he says that Arpia 2 is a quasi-TC it adds to Nova, but doesn't completely replace it). Anyhow, I think you should go for it. Personally, I have been working the last year on sorting out my own real world "issues" of those the TC is number three (the first issue has been completed, the second is near completion, should be done by February sometime). I am a bit hobbled until I get a new computer I've been told to wait till the 15th for Apple to make some announcement, but I'll be working on the timeline and storylines till then. Next term I'm taking solid modeling, so I'll see if I can parlay some of that skill into ship design. One step at a time and before you know it (9 months from now) it will be done.

But hey, if you don't get it done, you can always kick yourself later. (Jking, good luck)

Swithich

SWITHICH! YOUR BACK!

Nice to have you back swithich. I thought you weren't going to post again to avoid changing your post count. Oh well, that's over with now. Nice to have you back. Not that you ever left. or right. You know what I do or do not mean.

What about his back?

@lnsu, on Jan 11 2008, 04:40 PM, said in Restarting attempts:

SWITHICH! YOUR BACK!

LNSU meant 'Swithich is back'. Not 'There's something wrong about your back'. For those who don't get this the first time they read this statement.

And it should be 'SWITHICH! YOU'RE BACK!' There is one huge difference between 'Your' and 'You're'.

@king_of_manticores, on Jan 12 2008, 12:44 PM, said in Restarting attempts:

LNSU meant 'Swithich is back'. Not 'There's something wrong about your back'. For those who don't get this the first time they read this statement.

And it should be 'SWITHICH! YOU'RE BACK!' There is one huge difference between 'Your' and 'You're'.

Okay, I was going to try to resist to post so that the thread could continue on its original purpose, but now it is getting diverged.

Thank you LNSU, I got what you meant...and it is nice to be remembered.

For the rest you who need some help, it has something to do with the VXI...

You had to be here a while ago to get it and understand it.

For the moderators reading this, I think rmx256 has gotten some good responses and I think this thread has been pretty well hijacked. For anyone who has any comments on the subject you can post. For anyone else who wants to spam, put it in a PM to the person who you want to talk to. Otherwise this can pretty well be closed.

I was kidding. I saw that and couldn't resist.

Swithich, that's rather an overreaction. Two posts is not comphrehensive and total thread hijacking.

@shlimazel, on Jan 12 2008, 01:59 PM, said in Restarting attempts:

I was kidding. I saw that and couldn't resist.

Swithich, that's rather an overreaction. Two posts is not comphrehensive and total thread hijacking.

Ya, well it has been about a year and thee months...so that is why the big font and incorrect spellings, and that is five posts that have had nothing to do with the topic.

Okay, rmx...all I can say is this. TCs are hard as hell to get done (you know that) , and it is hard as hell getting something restarted (I think everyone knows that). There is no shame in you trying to do it and I'm sure you'd have the support of the community at large. With the history of TC development, the chances of getting any big project done is not good. Still, if you have the drive and can get something out of it to keep yourself interested, I'd go for it.

This post has been edited by Swithich : 13 January 2008 - 02:03 AM

Anyway, once many years ago I made a plug that added five outfits. I kept adding and adding until I had almost 80 outfits, weapons pictures, and descriptions. Then, one fateful day, I decided to add one more, and lo! I had exceeded the maximum megabyte file size and my work erased! Egad! Just recently, in an abandoned and dusty part of my hard drive, I recovered a semi-complete early backup. Not quite half of the outfits, and the descriptions sucked, but the outfits were pretty good. I dusted them off (and saved some for later) and kept working, and the product was Nebula.

I've hit the 15MB limit a few times. I don't lose anything, though. Just open a new file in ResEdit, copy half the stuff to that, and save them both. It works.

Of course, I don't know how other programs might behave. That's what's great about keeping the files online for the dev team----you've always got a backup.

For me trying to restart with out-of work plugs has never worked. I started about 15 TCs (Dark Vell-os, The Colonial Council Plug, my Star Wars TC, my Star Trek TC, my Starcraft TC, my Stargate TC, after which i run out of Star Things to make TCs about) and each one I completed about half. However, RealLife always got in my way (I hate the damn thing <_< ) and now they rot on the HD of my old mac and whenever I tried to continue, it did not really work, because I had lost track of all the lose ends i left...

In the past I've left Firefly alone for months at a time. It's always a bit of a challenge to get back into it, but I manage.