Object.lib Corrupted

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Adelade
Posts: 1346
Joined: August 27th, 2019, 10:24 am

Object.lib Corrupted

Post by Adelade »

Just wanted to give a friendly reminder to everyone to safety copy their APCD (or at least the object.lib and object folder) now and then if its been a long time since last... :smile:

TL;DR: My object lib got corrupted, but it turned out fine, only took 5 hours or so to recover, partly thanks of luck (within the overall bad luck), and partly thanks to having a sort of backup APCD from not too long ago.

Today I had my first-ever incident of my APCD's object.lib itself being corrupted. I've run into specific objects getting corrupted before, planting sets getting sort of corrupted before, and even course files getting corrupted before, but this was the first time the Object.lib itself got corrupted for me. No clue what caused it, just opened APCD in the morning and I got some type of error message that said the Object lib could not be loaded or something like that, and I could not make a new planting set or anything, all objects were gone from the library. I had been making plenty edits to objects within the object library the day before of course, but nothing beyond what I've done very often in the past.

No object graphics by themselves were truly lost, because the TGA files within APCD > Object > TGAs were still fine, but that still meant I would have to import each and every one back into APCD in order to ever use them... and I'd need to set their settings individually all over again...

Fortunately, I had a backup APCD from a few months back that I could paste the object.lib and Object folder from, into the new APCD.

Unfortunately, I had made a lot of edits (mostly colour edits) and some new additions to my object library since then... And much worse, I hadnt finished editing all planted objects on the course I was working on, and one cant edit already-planted objects unless they're recognized by the object library.

I still loaded the old object library and then did my best to update it with the new files from the new TGA folder and re-imported the new objects, which worked fine until I started trying to edit the last few objects on the course, APCD would just crash as soon as trying to update any object on the course. Im guessing this was because the new object lib wasnt fully identical to the one that the course had been planted with (even though I had done all I could to try make it so).

I thought things were really bad then, because I had a course where 80% planted trees had been edited to suit the textures etc, and 20% that neither fit in nor could be updated. Thought I would have to go around deleting and replanting those 20% by hand, which felt like a massive blow. Luckily, as I looked closer at it, it was less than 20% left to edit, only 10 different objects, and most of them still fit in decently enough so as not to need editing. I went around and replaced the last few by hand and it wasnt too bad. But if my object library had gotten corrupted just one day earlier or something.... it would have been devastating.

I used to backup my object library more often in the past, but then I kind of stopped doing it since 1. I had never needed the backups so far, and 2. I always used a new APCD for each new course I work on, and keep the old ones anyway, and as such get natural backups. But after this I think I will go back to making safety copies more often whenever I make a bunch of changes to my object library.
Finished Courses - Main: Amedal (fictional), Nine Bridges (real)
Other: Austin, Sheshan, Kauri Cliffs, Le Golf Nat. Updates: Whirlpool, Royal Lytham, Royal St George's, Chicago, Chambers Bay, Munchen Nord E
Working on: 2 fictional courses + a couple things...
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