Last night disaster struck. The last couple of times I opened the scene it kept telling me it could not find a given object or file called 'planche.something or other' (can't recall the file extension). Then it brought up a timeline window, which is odd because I haven't even tried to mess around with the animation plugin. Then it refused to open at all. When I try to open the file, the thumbnail of the image you see is all blurred, as though caught halfway through the rendering process. The other experimental scenes I've doodled around with open just fine.

Ran Scandisk; hard drive is error free. Ran Norton; no viruses in evidence. I'm running a Dell Pentium 733 with a GeForce 2 graphics card and 128 MB of memory -- an old machine, but still serviceable and well above the specs on the box. I emailed Eon's tech support, but I'm not sure what they can do from there about a (apparently) corrupted file.

Does anyone have any idea of what might be wrong? Am I doomed to lose a week's worth of delightful experimentation?

hmmm, I am not sure what happened, sometimes when I do a pic and it is looking for things that I may not have on my hard drive, but I took off a cd, so that does happen. The time line thing happened to me once, not any more. Your pic above is just wonderful though. Sharen

I've had that happen to me once or twice, and even a blank black thumbnail image. I re-started and it let me open the scene, though I didn't get the thumbnail back.

I can't help you with that but I just wanted to say that the scene looks great! It's busy without being cluttered, and really just fun. A few suggestions though. First, your sailboat seems to be leaking (though now that I think of it, that could fit the scene quite nicely.) and second, the contrast between the lush vegetation/grass and the sand is pretty stark. great job overall, though

First, I have to say, that scene looks very good, so I can certainly understand your frustration. :/ But, just on a hunch, have you applied one of the patches since you originally started this scene? I ask that because there seems to be a problem with older versions of *.VUE scenes, once the program has been patched.

There should be a file with the same name but with a bak extension... that's the backup file.. change the name of that and give it a vue extension, it should open up and you won't have lost your week's worth of work... Taht's happened to me in the past and the backup was fine....

I have no idea concerning your problem (file that have been displaced ?) Bu I like your picture, all is clean. Maybe to perfect , it looks like surrealist photo. Yves

YES! Tradivoro, my thanks! That was it! I could practically expire with relief right now.... when you're dealing with randomly-generated terrain, every minor artistic accomplishment is built on a series of happy accidents... I've been trying half-heartedly to resurrect it, but it just doesn't look as good. Now I can take the lessons I've learned in my additional two days of doodling and put them to fine use (note to self: real shadows are not cardboard-cutout silhouettes; additional note to self; real vegetation does not grow straight up and down... oh, and corroded bronze shows up on blue water much better than flat black). For all the compliments, my thanks. I know it looks stark and unfinished in spots -- surrealistically neat, as it were -- but then again, I got interrupted. I'll post again when I feel the results are worthy of public inspection. Thanks again!

heyas; very cool. :) and don't worry about the stupid timeline thing, it seems vue always wants put that out when you open your scenes. just close it ;)