Is there a good reason why C3 can't open projects if plugins/behaviours are missing?

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  • I have a rather large C2 project that I'm trying to open in C3. It uses a bunch of plugins and behaviours that I don't really care about, what I want is to be able to open the project to copy and paste some of the events and objects into a new project to save time. I don't seem to be able to copy and paste between C2 and C3 which is frustrating, so I'm trying to open the project up but I get a bunch of errors. C3 essentially locks me out of the entire thing. I know I can manually remove them all, or convert the C2 behaviours to C3 (I don't have time for that). Is there a good reason why it locks you out completely? I realise any event references to plugins/behaviours that aren't present won't work, but couldn't any of those just be disabled or deleted on startup (with a warning)? Maybe there is a good technical reason for this, but in the audio world for instance if you load up third party software such as a VSTi in a DAW, if that software is missing it doesn't lock you out of the whole project, it just tells you it's missing and can't process the part that uses the third party software - and this system works really well.

    Migrating a large project from C2 to C3, rather than being super easy, is a nightmare.

  • I also found this a bit frustrating. I even used two C2 behaviors that C3 also features; MoveTo and PinToImagePoint. Yet C3 wouldn't simply 'replace' them.

    It appears C3 is programmed differently, hence we can't copy code back and forth.

    And as you mentioned, I would definitely agree that importing a C2 regardless of missing plugins etc. would make life easier. They could just permanently 'toggle disabled' the code or something, so you could at least review it and replace it below those lines, and then delete the old code yourself.

    Now I had to delete all the lines in C2, import, add the code again, add the behaviors, etc. while switching back and forth dozens of times between C2 and C3. Fortunately in my case it was only a bunch of lines, imagine wanting to import a huge C2 project..

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  • convert plugins with this link

    construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/plugin-sdk-10/plugin-converter-123855

    open your project with c2runtime and edit it as you wish.

  • Yes, it is very frustrating indeed. I realise this would be a low priority for C3 dev at this stage, but it just seems like poor design, completely locking you out of a project because a third party plugin is missing. I can't think of any other creative software that does this. They will always load the main project, albeit without the bits that are missing. Maybe there is a good reason, but due to how many of these plugins were stored years ago, trawling the forums for anything just results in a bunch of dead dropbox links.

  • They could just permanently 'toggle disabled' the code or something, so you could at least review it and replace it below those lines

    As I understand, the reason why it's not possible in C3 is because its code editor is visual. It can not display an event or action from the missing plugin, because it doesn't know how. (this info is in the missing plugin)

    The only option is to skip all these events, actions and conditions. And there is a good chance that the project will become corrupted without them - there may be orphaned Else-blocks, missing functions, broken hierarchies etc.

    Also, I guess, Scirra developers want to avoid complaints from people whose projects became unusable because of that.

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