Help AE arc screen turns red and unresponsive

[onenfguard]

So this is my first time working on an AE arc and trying to learn the ins and outs and been having fun with it so far.  The first time I had a problem was when I accidentally published the arc to early and tried to bring it back to my local stories and deleted it while trying to make the switch back.  I decided to just make it again and I was told to make a back up just in case. The problem is I have not done so yet and again something happened and I lost the arc again. Here is a quick bullet point of what I was doing before I got this screen (screen shot at bottom).

• logged in and worked on the arc a bit.
• started play testing changes then clicked end task force button to make some fixes.
• decided to take a break and logged off.
• logged back on about an hour later (first red flag) and noticed all my characters where rearranged in different order which only happens if I log on on a different computer.
• thought that was weird and then I checked on AE arc and got this red glow to the file and all options grayed out.

Looks like I wont be able to recover it from what it looks like was just wondering if this has happed to anyone else and is there any way to prevent this from happening.  I am guessing the best thing is just to make a back up every so often when things just happen like this.  

[Darmian]

Oh, odd. Not seen that before!

[Greycat]

Can't hop in game right now.  Can't say I've seen this - but does this also happen opening up the autosave above it?

 

It should also be saved in your COH (or homecoming) directory as a .storyarc file - might want to attach it. I can't think of anything that would *do* that in the file but it couldn't hurt to see if someone else sees the same thing with the same file. (And the file itself would be there to examine.)

[onenfguard]

About the autosave, no does not have read glow to it and I can still access it.  There was five in development missions and now there is just the first one with everything intact not sure why that is, not to tech savvy to be honest.  

 

I just have one guess to how this could have happened and I think it has to do with the computer not having enough space.  This computer is used by pretty much everyone and I did not notice there was little to no space left on it.  Since then I have made plenty of room and tried to see if that would help but it didn't seem work.

[GM Impervium]

Look in your CoH directory to see if there's any sign of the arcs saved locally. They would be under Homecoming -> Architect (assuming you're using HC Launcher). Any arcs you have would be text files (They'd be called something like test.storyarc, hero.storyarc, etc). If you double-click one, Windows may ask you what program you want to use to open it. Select WordPad and you should be able to open it.

Lack of space on your HD shouldn't be an issue. The largest missions can be upwards of 500K, but most one-shots or simple arcs are usually much smaller than that.

Anyway, I managed to replicate this by filling the text file with junk data (basically just overwrote most of it with "asdfghjkl"over and over). If other people use your computer, they might have somehow borked the text file by writing something into it. Or something on your HD might have caused some file corruption.

[Linea]

tldr: I suspect you have corrupt files.  I suggest disabling any local autosave feature like dropbox, google drive, synology, etc while editing AE Arcs.  I currently use microsoft, which does appear compatible, but you may want to disable it as well while editing for good measure.

 

 

CoH also can somtimes re-read all the AE files anytime any of them are changed externally.  ALL THE FILES. 

*IF* you're using dropbox, drive, synology, etc to constantly backup your directories, you may need to disable this while writing arcs in AE.  The only one that I can verify DOES work while editing is Microsoft Drive.  Synology and Dropbox, last time I used them, did NOT work and had to be disabled while editing.   They temporarily lock the files while uploading/downloading, and while that may only take a second, that may leave the file locked right when CoH needs it.  Worse, it may trigger CoH to re-read the file confusing things, and then having dropbox resync, which then has CoH resync, which then has dropbox resync .... This WAS an issue in the past, it may or may not still be, it may or may not apply to microsoft drive (but as far as I can tell microsoft drive is currently compatible, that's what I'm currently using)

 

CoH will also try to recreate your .cvg files EVERY time you enter Edit mode the first time for each new copy of the .exe. 

This can be an issue if you dual box.

This can be an issue if the files are missing.

 

CoH will also try to recreate your .critter files, or read them, when it does the above recreate of .cvgs.  ALL of your .critters.

This can be an issue if you dual box.

This can be an issue if the files are missing.  This particular version can be very nasty and completely lock CoH permanently.

 

CoH will try to reread ALL your .critters if you externally edit or change any .critters.

ALL your .critters.  This particular version can be very nasty and completely lock CoH permanently.

This can also be related to dropbox, drive, google, microsoft, etc. (see above first issue)