Needless to say, we got a lesson in how to get things up & running again quickly. Luckily, most of the project was on an off-site subversion server, so the main code was easy enough to bring up again, although there were a few config files we didn't check in to avoid stepping over each other - now we have backup defaults checked in to prevent having reconstruct them in the future.
The week before I spent wresting with compiler issues, I found out that the _SECURE_SCL=1 setting ( on by deafult in all configs for vs2k5 and later ) will gladly link code with libs that have _SECURE_SCL=0, and thus generate no end of runtime errors for your pleasure. The sheer joy of rebuilding all of my libraries with the same setting was intense for sure, not to mention the days it took to diagnose the issue in the first place.
The only solace, is that I have improved the ambient lighting in the game mightily, via a series of hacks which I will describe once I can get the game running again on this machine, instead of my deathly slow vista box.
Another upside, I suppose, is the tools & techniques I have learned in the process, and the cleaning up of unnecessary dependencies, code and data files.
Hopefully we will be back to full speed at the end of the week, and can put together the release candidate.
