Project Zomboid Derailed By Burglary

[Mid-Boss]

DON'T reply to Oldtaku he's obviously trolling and seeks your irritation and anger to get his jollies. Hit the report button when you see crap like this. Don't give them the attention they crave.

I am not trolling, I am suggesting that you and Indie Stone grow up. If they learn from this, and the next time they fail hard on some easily preventable disaster they recover easily because they'd actually anticipated it, I will buy the game.

I realize that's harsh and not something you want to hear, dude. But once you've dealt with enough defective people in your personal life you'll realize that helping them continue to be lazy and damaged is counterproductive. We'll see how you feel in ten years.

Sorry, there are 2 billion people world wide that have logged on to the internet at some point and many of them have left their opinions somewhere. Realizing this, the opinions of a single person don't mean anything and are merely text on a screen to me.

To put it in simple terms for you, nothing you say matters to me so you are completely incapable of garnering the emotional response you desire. Seek easier prey elsewhere.

This is the one and only reply you'll get out of me regardless of what your predictably hateful and insult laden response to this post is.

Have a nice day.

 

[Enkidu88]

Luckily we have dozens of other zombie games to fill the gap.

 

[LorienvArden]

There is stealing someone's TV, and there is taking their money. But something they put hard months into?

Excuse me, where the f* is the difference ? If you stole my car, you would have stolen about 6 years of hard work from me.
If you steal from someone, you steal something that was earned by honest work.
Most of the time anyway, considering if you stole from a politician it would be earned by dirty work most of the time...

 

[T-Bone24]

It is a sad story around Project Zomboid since it started development and it is borderline tragic that they were robbed after all that. Some people just have no luck.

But they did not handle this situation well. Swearing and yelling at the people trying to troll you will just increase their numbers. They should have just waited it out whilst they were sorting this mess. Although I probably would have been the same, it's not easy being burgled.

 

[Bob_Dobb]

"Shit, the deadlines coming up..."
"It's alright, just say thieves took the code"

...Slackers.

 

[Aizsaule]

on the bright side, this game is awesome.

 

[thenumberthirteen]

I also want to wring the neck of the chav scum that did this.

It's in Newcastle so the correct term would be Charva.

Like all burglaries it is awful, but particularly that it's effected so many people, and may ruin this fledgling developer (Newcastle needs more game devs). They are right. Everyone is going to have a go at them for not backing up securely. Wether this is a result of finances or poor planning I'm sure that next time they'll be damn sure to make regular backups.

I feel for them, but I've set many businesses and home users in the north east up with off site backups. It's not hard or expensive.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

The moment these foolish fools try to sell or torrent the game code, a billion nerds will descend upon them and they will know true wrath.

 

[Owlslayer]

Oh damn, i really feel sorry for the guys who are making the game. A shame they didn´t have a more up-to-date backup. I hope they´ll still be able to make the game. Also, i just went and downloaded the demo. Didn´t have the time to play it yet, but I´ll do that soon!

 

[MammothBlade]

These guys aren't cursed, they're just really incompetent.

Yeah. Alot of "bad luck" is just bad planning. Come on, how hard is it to make frequent backups?

 

[ace_of_something]

Blaming the victim is really tacky, people.
Even if they should've made backups they still probably had a lot of other stuff stolen (it was their home) and as far as being preventative of a burglary you can only do as much as you're income allows.

 

[MammothBlade]

I don't like blaming victims, but in this case... they needed data insurance, aka backup.

 

[GrandmaFunk]

Yeah, they should have made backups. But blaming them for this setback is like blaming a woman for having her purse stolen for not looping the handle around the leg of her chair at a restaurant.

a more appropriate comparison would be one where the woman was carrying her entire life savings in that purse.

nobody blames them for the theft, it's just painfully stupid to carry all your eggs in one basket.

 

[darksakul]

Lessons learned.
Do not sore critical information on a mobile device like a LAPTOP.
Back up your data regularly and often.
Get better door locks

 

[Atmos Duality]

"I expect I'll either get a lot of disbelief or a lot of flak for no regular offsite backup," wrote Simpson. "I deserve both."

Yeah. You do.
Fool.

I can sympathize with them being burglarized; that wasn't their fault.
But I cannot sympathize with their lack of foresight in keeping (essentially) their core project secured against such a simple disaster. They could have lost those computers due to accident or other disaster and still ended up in the same situation they are now.

In the field of security, "Minimal necessary redundancy" doesn't mean "no backup".

 

[mariofan1000]

Let's guess what happens next!

I predict someone will burst in the dev's house and shoot one of them.

 

[Illessa]

Blaming the victim is really tacky, people.
Even if they should've made backups they still probably had a lot of other stuff stolen (it was their home) and as far as being preventative of a burglary you can only do as much as you're income allows.

I don't blame them for the theft, it seriously sucks that that happened to them and I wish them all the best.

But the loss of data? That's worrying. Version Control [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control] is pretty much part of software development 101 these days, and the fact that this happened implies they're either not using it, or they're using it extremely badly (and the blog post implying that 1/day offsite backups are a big hassle implies the former). If you don't have your own server, places like Assembla do free Git and SVN hosting so there's really no excuse. Hell, I drop pretty much every bit of code I write into source control because it's a trivial thing to do, means I won't lose track of it and have maximum context when I go and look at it again (from commit comments).

If they take less care over the source of the game they're charging people money for than I do over random crap I write in 5 minutes on a whim, I think a bit of a 'WTF?' reaction is pretty legitimate.

 

[samsonguy920]

There is stealing someone's TV, and there is taking their money. But something they put hard months into?

Excuse me, where the f* is the difference ? If you stole my car, you would have stolen about 6 years of hard work from me.
If you steal from someone, you steal something that was earned by honest work.
Most of the time anyway, considering if you stole from a politician it would be earned by dirty work most of the time...

The difference is, you could get another car from the insurance payout(granted you had your car insured with full coverage). These guys had their work stolen, that even though can replace it with some more hard work, by the time they do, some dillhole who either stole that data or bought it from the thieves could finish the more polished code and release it on torrents or such himself.
That's the real theft that could happen here. It would bring all their hard work from day one to nothing. It doesn't compare to a car that is easier to replace.
And, if you steal from a politician, the only thing you take is what they stole from good people in the first place. Do you return that to the people?

All of this just brings me back to the hack of Sony. People were so eager to blame Sony and sue for monies over an act someone else did. May as well sue your landlord when the house/apartment you rent gets broken into.
It is about time people accepted the fact that there are those who will try these things. We need to be more vigilant to prevent the act from becoming worse because you decided to leave your mother's diamond necklace laying on the dining table when you went for a weekend trip.
These guys made a mistake, there is no denying that. They are owning up to it and putting themselves in for harder work to make up for it. What I have to ask is, what more do you people want? Do you want to hang them, beat them, or stone them? Get your heads out of the dark ages, already, and move on. We can continue playing the blame game or we can forgive and correct the mistakes made.

 

[Thyunda]

Sucks to be them. Yeah, they probably should have saved a backup more recently, but at the end of the day, they've been robbed. It's not that they've had some corrupted data that foresight COULD have avoided, it's that somebody broke into their home and took their laptops, most likely without knowing what they were for. Now. What kind of planning avoids that one? Don't let anybody know you're in possession of expensive equipment? Hire night-time security? Yeah...like that's going to happen.
I like to write. I know this isn't the same thing in any way, but I have pages and pages of stories and journals stored on this computer. If my laptop was to be stolen, I would lose all of that. I'll still have everything up to the final chapter of my favourite story, because those chapters were put on DeviantART. The ending to the story would be lost. Every other draft I'd typed would be lost too.
My insurance would cover the costs of the lost laptop. But, nothing would bring back those stories...and I can't write them again. It wouldn't be the same.

However. Like Indie Stone, I do not think my apartment will be broken into. I don't have full security teams. I have a lock, a chain and some friendly neighbours. A determined intruder could get in relatively easily, I'm sure.
So, what? Shall I back up copies of my writing in eight secret places, on the off-chance that seven get broken into? No. Nobody has that kind of foresight. Blaming Indie Stone for this calamity is a ridiculous thing to do. It's not that the work has been set back. I mean, that's part of it, it's the fact that it's been taken. This wasn't some unavoidable mechanical failure...this was a couple of assholes taking what wasn't their's.

But then, it IS Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I suppose anything that runs on lecktrickity over there is taken so that they may gather around and marvel at it for a hours, before the battery dies and the search for a new god begins again.
I'm glad I was born next to the GOOD Newcastle. Under Lyme, that is.

 

[Aenir]

"Shit, the deadlines coming up..."
"It's alright, just say thieves took the code"

...Slackers.

Excuse me, what deadline? They did not have a deadline, and they have police reports to back them up.

Go troll elsewhere.