Almost a Video

Hello, this week I got so closeto a video being ready but it just fell apart at the last possible moment in the most frustrating way. I won't get into the full nitty gritty details here because I'm hoping this will be solved eventually and I can make a video about it, but I've been working on a tool for exporting/importing all the dynamic data for the Hydro Thunder games. https://github.com/AkBKukU/HydroThunder-TimeTool This one one of those projects that just happened with baby steps, first I discovered that all the settings and high scores weren't stored in a file and to copy them you have to do a full drive image. Then while looking at the data when moving it I saw the initials were just standard ASCII and found out the times were 32b floats. So I eventually ended up decoding basically the whole data set to read from it and then figured I should try to write back to it, but it had some kind of checksum that was adding changes to specific bytes. With some fantastic help from WizardTim on Github after working on it all week it seemed like the checksum had been reverse engineered. We  could correctly calculate the checksums for the dozens of samples I collected and write valid data back to the game. Then I tried to do the one thing that made sense with this. Write world record high scores for the game to it to. And somehow, that broke the checksum in a way that made no sense. We have some very rough ideas on what it could be (the game has loose interpretations of this "math" concept when it comes to rounding floats) but there isn't a lot to go on from here. But not being able to do the single thing that makes this whole project cool instead of just a novelty kind of sank the video potential, at least for now.

Also this week, I've been battling my video storage and render server a lot. I guess I blinked and my long term storage drives are 90% full and I've been trying to add more drives to it so I have room to work again. But even that has been a roller coaster, I bought drives from amazon and one of them arrived in a perfect shipping box but the retail box was trashed. I started a return on it and ordered a replacement. I had to replace an older SATA/SAS controller in my server that these drives would connect to that can't read drives over 2TB. But after multiple days of troubleshooting that with the new RAID array failing and drives dropping out I narrowed the issues down to the new SATA controller I bought being bad. I have another controller on order now and have been able to temporarily shuffle drives in the remaining bays to make the server somewhat usable. But I'm feeling a little stuck on this and don't know if I want to attempt and trust data migration yet or not until I get all the drives in their final setup.

Hopefully next week goes a lot smoother. I have one or two ideas for smaller videos to scale back a bit while I finish up some of these things (hopefully).

The (Not actual produced video but a demonstration) video link: https://youtu.be/213Eqf5ciGs)