Don't you love making a really hard puzzle and then you go to sleep. Then when you wake up you forget how to solve your own puzzle, so you have to stare at it for 20 minutes to make sure it is possible. Done that too many times.

I know, but you know what's worse? Doing that, then realising your sister shut down Hammer overnight without saving, and not having a recent enough backup to reconstruct the puzzle. Happened to me twice... My sister's 21, you'd think shed have some common sense by now.

I would think saving it before you went to sleep would be the common sense. I know I press my save button after doing like 2 things in hammer, so I save a lot! Hammer not reliable enough to not save like crazy.

The weird part is, I do, but I dunno, Hammmer is VERY, VERY temperamental for me. I'll often save it, and it will say it's saved, then I open the Flags tab(I always save before doing that) and it ends u crashing and corrupting the file anyway.

EDIT: That, and, it's entirely possible she does it to spite me, now I co e to think of it.

baca25 wrote:
I would think saving it before you went to sleep would be the common sense. I know I press my save button after doing like 2 things in hammer, so I save a lot! Hammer not reliable enough to not save like crazy.

Once you start doing this you won't stop because it can be VERY useful.

Many times I have had Hammer crash on me, but luckily I save after each step I do.

I press Ctrl S instinctively about every 10 seconds, knowing the wonderful reliability of Hammer isn't going to get me through 2 hours without a horribly crash.

The Irate Pirate wrote:
I press Ctrl S instinctively about every 10 seconds, knowing the wonderful reliability of Hammer isn't going to get me through 2 hours without a horribly crash.

For me it mostly happens when I go to edit the preferences of a floor button...nothing else.

Every time I compiled successfully without errors (leaks), I save a backup copy of the VMF.

It has happened to me before when I made some changes and compiled, and some mysterious leaks appear that I simply cannot get rid of. So this way, I can at least revert to the previous successful compile without starting over from scratch.

Hey, how about we see how many of the Hammer crashing achievements we have?

chickenmobile wrote:
Wake Up Call: Have Hammer crash.
In Soviet Russia, Hammer crash you: You temporarily or permanently give up a project because hammer crashes (or crashed too many times).
I've done my job: Hammer crashes when you just compiled.
It's what you tell yourself: Hammer crashes just before you save it.
Now why did it do that?: Hammer crashes when you have music running, have a process-killing game running, photoshop open, editing a movie file, chatting on MSN, talk on Skype, hacking someone's computer, reading emails... like a boss...
Hammer see, Hammer do: Hammer crashes when the game you just compiled for crashes.
Maybe I should just delete it?: Hammer crashes continuously when you try to edit the same brush or entity multiple times.
Banged the head on the nail: Hammer crashes within 1 minute of you opening it.
But I wasn't even there!? Hammer crashes when you were afk.

Every single one of those, in the past week. ...wow, that's kinda sad, but then, I DO need to invest in a new computer.

satchmo wrote:
Every time I compiled successfully without errors (leaks), I save a backup copy of the VMF.

This is an extremely good idea, and not just because you can mess things up without realising it.

I once lost a few hours of work because I found out too late that Hammer was saving only about half of the VMF file to disk, and when it finally totally crashed it couldn't read back the nonsense it had created. (And yes, the automatic .vmx backup file it makes was mauled too.)

So backups are your friend

The only time Hammer crashes for me is when I try to run Portal 2 through Hammer using "Run Map." I got around it by exiting Hammer, exiting Authoring Tools, wait for a minute, then launch Portal 2.

I always uncheck the option to run map after compiling.

This problem dates back to the Half-Life 2 mapping days.

The Irate Pirate wrote:
I press Ctrl S instinctively about every 10 seconds, knowing the wonderful reliability of Hammer isn't going to get me through 2 hours without a horribly crash.

Same here. For me it just begun very early. Maybe someone remembers to Hammer in 2005. It crashed more than now in Portal 2.