Please Help! Suddenly my project (many back-ups of it going back months) won't open!

Hi everyone,

Suddenly out of no-where I went to load my project up and I got the dreaded "Failed to open project. Check it is a valid Construct 3 single file."Z

so I tried ton's of combinations of past builds of Construct and older saves of my game project going back months... still the same issue! I know for a fact all these versions used to load perfectly fine. I tried on a second computer, different browsers, etc.

I pressed f12 and here's what the console reports:

Does anyone have any ideas?

dop2000 Thanks very much for the reply. I'm continuing to experiment and research today to try to learn more, and I'll report back here.

I did find out I needed to expand the two top error messages in console and here's how that looks.

Try this: open C3, open console log, clear it, then try to open the project. The last error in the log should be the one that matters.

With all info given, it is indeed weird.

I have 1 possible idea, very unlikely:

Did you had addons, and you did NOT bundle them in your project, so each test you did on other computers and browsers, you had to install those addons, then open your project and get errors?

If that is what you're doing, then, did you modify those addons or update them?

I say all of this, because, I tinkered with addons before and this made projects unable to be opened (didn't check console when this happened).

Beyond this, I may be wrong, but, might be worth emailing your project to Scirra's support email, as, it's not a bug, but it's a severe issue with your project. Just clarify in the email what you've tried, other computers, other browsers, older C3, older backups, etc.

It may be impossible for them to solve, or may be a huge endeavour for Scirra to investigate especially if its a large project, but, well, if I were in your position, that would feel like my only hope with such a severe issue.

Do you have other info you can think of - did you mess with containers a lot in your project? Did you only add containers recently? Have you had a look at your c3p file with 7zip/zip software, does it open? Is it blank? Is it corrupt when you try to open it and open a random file within? Does this happen with any other projects? If unsure, try making a new project or take an example project, save it, close, open.

I even wonder if "container" is a red herring in the context of Construct, maybe it's not container-related but a weird generic error message referring to another type of "container" within JS/html.

Thanks again dop2000 and Jase00,

I do use several add-ons, but I'm 100 percent sure it's the same add-ons and they've not been changed for well over a year. When I installed them in the other browser and computer it was from the same exact source for them (a folder on my hard drive) that I've always used to re-install the plug-ins when necessary (new computers, cleared browser cache, etc.)

I almost never directly use containers, but I'm extensively using the Spriter (SCML) plug-in, and that automatically creates a container when you import a spriter file to create the spriter object and its associated sprites, so every time I updaste a spriter file, in a way, that container gets messed with.

I'm going to keep looking into this for at least another day, also with the help of Spriter's programmer before I bother Ashley at Scirra with it.

Of course I'll report back any info once I've done more careful tests etc.

thanks agian!