Did C2 destroy my project?

Today when i tried to open my project file, it only gave me this error message:

I tried to open it with text editor, but the file is unreadable with it (gibberish). Also that "TiledBackground3.png" is something i have not used in my project for while (it's my first test to do background for the game and when I noticed that it does not look good, i did another sprite as bg). So I don't understand why i still have in that file something that reminds me about that old test after many resaves.

edit: i also tried to open backup file, but it has the same error message.

caproj? I dont know, It may have destroyed your project, when you closed it last did it crash or something?

Yeah, there was some sort of error message at last time i was closing it. If i can remember correctly, it could not build the project because of some shader error. I just cannot remember the details.

No but it's say's cannot find tilebackground3.png not found. You might have move it

No, i have not moved any files after previous open / close. Also why come it cannot open the project without one png file? It cannot be the last screw that holds the whole boat up.

Just place another PNG there with the same name so you can get past that error, and have a look once the project file is open.

Oh, now i understand. Construct 2 actually saved the whole project and everything into it, to windows Temp folder.... (Why in the name of God it needed to do that... )

I know i cannot save it then, because needed to clean temp to save disc space in C...

I think my game is ready now if there is not any trick to save this... Latest autosave i have, is almost 2 weeks old.

Strange, I hope it works out, I thought it saved your projects only locally to the folder you chose at the start of your project.

I had C2 opened when i was cleaning my Temp folder. It probably had some temporary files there and I deleted them. This quite much killed my inspiration. Because so much work lost during this. Maybe i will find it again later. :/

That's good to know. It makes sense since capx files need to be unzipped somewhere to be editable. I have a suspicion that may be the main cause of capx corruption. :/

One workaround for the future could be to use a project folder save instead of capx files.

Ashley

Just curious if it would be feasible to have c2 extract capx files to another location other than the temp folder when editing? Or I wonder if there's a way to block them from being deleted while the project is open.

What you should do is use the option, "Save As Single File..".

I moved my capx to my new computer, and it didn't work because the images were saved on my other computer at the %temp% folder.

I then saved my capx using the "Save As Single File.." option, and it works when I move it to my new computer.

Just curious if it would be feasible to have c2 extract capx files to another location other than the temp folder when editing? Or I wonder if there's a way to block them from being deleted while the project is open.

This problem comes up from time to time and I don't really know what to do about it. If you have a bunch of programs open and you wipe your temp folder, is it really surprising to then find out you wiped files that were actively in use by the currently open programs?

C2 stores a lot of project information in temp because changes shouldn't be saved to your project until you click "save". With .capx files, which are really an entire project folder in a zip, it extracts the entire project to temp and works with everything there until you click save, then it zips the whole temp folder again and overwrites your .capx file. This is essential: nobody wants their file on disk to be modified until they click "save".

I don't want to make it save anywhere else because the operating system "temp" folder is the correct place to put this. If you do something like open a .capx and then forcibly close C2 (or it crashes), its temp files are all left behind. These kinds of leftover files can accumulate for various reasons, and then you may want to legitimately clean them all up, which standard tools/OS functions can do - just I assumed you'd always do this without any programs actively open!

So it seems some people run these utilities while their projects are open in C2, and it goes ahead and wipes their currently open work in temp. I think C2 can lock the files to prevent other tools trying to delete them, but I never thought people would try to do this, so now there's all sorts of bits of code scattered all through the C2 codebase which accesses various parts of the project in temp. If I forget just one file, the project will still get corrupted by cleaning temp. So... don't clean temp when apps are using temp files?

Ashley Some programs could protect their files so you cannot delete them if the files are in use. Could this be done to C2 too?

Ashley

You can't control what a user does outside of a program. Locking the files may help, but yeah, it's more of a user misunderstanding about the use of the temp folder.

sorbias

Ashley answered that above you.

I got this error a month back or so, I'm not sure what caused it (might have been paint.NET or something, since they both used files with the same name I dunno). I got it to work by opening the .capx in winrar and added the missing file into the destination specified in the error, have you tried doing that?