Corrupt MFA file

[Gullyking]

Well, I may have really screwed up here!

I've been working on this project for about 3 months now. I hadn't placed any sound into the game until this morning. Everything went well enough after the music files were entered into the game. Then, I saved the project and took a nap. When I woke and tried to reopen the project, I was suddenly hit with an internal error:

"Out of memory"

"Failed to Open document"

What a terrible situation!

I then thought, I would try to use the .001 file and it DID indeed open correctly. However, it's about eight or ten hours back! Which sucks!

Anyway, I still have the MFA file. So I was wondering a couple things:

1) What's the memory 'limit' on MMF2 projects?
2) Is there another way to open the MFA file and just take out the music files to reduce the size so I can get back in and adjust things to reduce memory. (Something I unfortunately never thought of until now!)

I think I just learned an important lesson. "Make manual backups often! Don't rely on the auto backup thing!" I had never gotten this far in a project before and I hate to learn this lesson at this particular time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[happygreenfrog]

MFA files can only be 2GB big at most. As a result, storing as much as possible externally is a good idea. Fortunately, since it's only around eight or ten hours back, it shouldn't take nearly as long as the first time you made it to get your progress back, especially since it isn't nearly as much of a matter of "how in the world do I do this" so much as "I do this like this".

If you are using one frame per level right now, it would be a good idea to start storing your levels externally by making a simple level builder for your game, and then making sure that you know how to load the saved levels in-game. It would also be a good idea to store large backgrounds externally, and a good idea to store large sounds like musics externally (or, to make sure, store all of your sounds externally). Making sounds external instead of internal, obviously, is quicker than changing all of your levels to be stored externally instead of internally.

[Gullyking]

Thanks for the reply, happygreenfrog. When you say save the music files externally, how so? I have a folder in the same apppath$ as the application itself. There is a global variable set to change the bgm at runtime if 'no music is playing'. When I set the "Play sample on channel x" command, does it somehow take the file store it in with the rest of the project? Does this mean that once I set the file up in the event editor that there is no need for such a folder, as the file becomes part of the application? Further, once I delete the event condition and/or action which references the sample file, will it be deleted from the memory? Or do I have to go in and somehow delete the file another way to free up the space?

[J3sseM]

Welcome to a club Gullyking!
I went around 1 week back since my MFA is quite huge it did not take backups.

Anyway, it is frustrating but 10 hours ain't so bad!

[happygreenfrog]

Thanks for the reply, happygreenfrog. When you say save the music files externally, how so?...

To store a music externally, simply put it in a sub-folder for the application (E.G. "music") and then use the "Play sample file on a specific channel" (there isn't a normal "play sample file" action, unfortunately) action that the sound object has (if you aren't using the latest version of MMF2, you might not have it, as it came in a later build as far as I know (update to the latest version of MMF2 if you haven't already updated to it, even if the action exists for you)), and then enter the following in the expression for the path (assuming the music is a file called "Music.wav"): AppPath$+"/music/Music.wav"

That should allow you to play your musics externally. Make sure to delete any actions that play the same music internally, so that you actually make your MFA file smaller.