bscotch
Unsure what causes Stitch to be unable to load projects
I get this error message in the bottom right corner when trying to open my game. It doesn't happen with all of my projects, only with some. I can edit all my code and I get the correct syntax colors for GML code but it prevents me from compiling and looking at the GameMaker resources.
The only thing I've noticed is that projects running on Stable seem to load flawlessly, whereas projects on GameMaker LTS or Beta failed to load. Does Stich only work with Stable?
GameMaker is constantly making small, undocumented changes to their project file formats (sometimes reverting changes from one version to the next), so I don't even try to make sure Stitch works with every single change.
We do extensive testing with each GameMaker runtime that releases, and try to keep our projects updated to always use the latest Stable or Beta version that passes all of our tests. However, we typically find regressions and new issues with each GameMaker release, so it's relatively infrequent that we get a new GameMaker runtime (and paired IDE) version that we'll upgrade to (maybe once a quarter or so). Unfortunately, each change I make to Stitch to account for changes in new GameMaker versions increases the likelihood that old versions of GameMaker will stop being compatible with Stitch.
Options when you find an incompatible GameMaker version:
- If the GameMaker version is older than 12 months, you'll probably have to upgrade your GameMaker version for the project to find a compatible Stitch version
- If the GameMaker version is 6-12 months old, the issue might be something I can fix without breaking current compatibility. I'll just need an Issue with: the GameMaker IDE version that's broken and a sample file that's causing the error (e.g. in the error message above we can see it's the yyp file that Stitch is erroring on).
- If the GameMaker version is a recent (0-6 months old) Beta or Stable then there's a good chance the change is something they're planning to make, so it's worth submitting an Issue so I can investigate.
- Note that GameMaker is in the process of developing basically a forked version of the engine that will change in a huge number of ways. It's been in various forms of alpha/beta for people to try out, but we won't make any efforts to support the new fork until it's been stable for a while.
@zuiaiyangyang3 Versions of GameMaker we're currently using:
-
2024.11.0.179- The most stable one. It's what Crashlands 2 uses, and we're REALLY putting the engine through its paces for that game. -
2024.1400.0.904- The latest version that works well for our latest game, How Many Dudes. It's a much less complex game, though, so it doesn't test the full breadth of expected engine behavior.
@shichen85 might have some additional input here, since he handles all of our engine testing.
Beta IDE version 2024.1400.2.941 works for me too loading and running the engine testing project https://github.com/bscotch/ganary, so the Stable version from 2024.11 to 2024.14 should all work.
Stitch is usually the most compatible with Stable, as LTS's project format is too old, and Beta's format goes through frequent changes that might break Stitch.
Having the same issue here too. I'm on IDE 2024.14.2.213 and I keep getting messages like this:
WARN 00:42:16.631 getGmlFile: Could not find project for objects/objAppIcon/Create_0.gml
INFO 00:42:26.956 No active project. Can't load sprite sources.
INFO 00:43:01.373 No active project. Can't load sprite sources.
INFO 00:44:01.380 No active project. Can't load sprite sources.
Funny thing is I haven't recently updated or anything. For me it just worked one day, next morning I loaded VSCode and it stopped working. Once, I pushed a commit to Github, and it magically started working again... until I closed VSCode and when I loaded it again, it stopped working.
@tedmahsun those messages mean that Stitch did not load a project, so now when it goes to perform other actions it can't (since there's no loaded project to perform them on).
This is probably due to one of:
- Stitch failed to parse your main YYP file. It should have shown an error popup if so, and I'd need a copy of your YYP file to debug why it's failing.
- Or, the folder you've opened in VSCode includes more than one
.yypfile somewhere inside, so that Stitch is popping up a selection message when it first loads BUT you're hitting escape or clicking somewhere before making that choice, causing the selector to be dismissed and no project to be selected. Keep an eye on the top of the VSCode window for the selector when Stitch is loading! (There is a new setting to allowlist projects so you don't have to make that selection -- in your VSCode settings search for "stitch allow").
Note that the latter case could be caused by prefabs (see #291), if you use them. I'll be fixing that in a future update.
@adam-coster
the folder you've opened in VSCode includes more than one .yyp file somewhere inside, so that Stitch is popping up a selection message when it first loads
Aha! Turns out that was the issue I was having all along, except I kept missing the selection message popping up because one of my extensions was quickly stealing focus. By chance I saw it appear for a quick second, and managed to click it in just in time and it worked. And it so happens I did add some prefabs the day before so that solves that mystery for me.
The allowlist setting fixed it for me, but it's gonna be a pain if I have to do it for every project I load later. Hope that future update comes soon! Thanks so much!
Whew. Glad it was that and not something weirder!
Yeah it's definitely an annoyance. It'd be an easy brute-force fix if I could assume that any yyp file with prefabs as part of their file path should be excluded, but I'm sure there are cases where people actually do want those to show up, so I'll need to do the due diligence of adding a setting to opt in to see those as well as write up some logic that is a bit smarter.
Which is all to say: it's just complicated enough that I need to make sure I do it right and test it thoroughly, so it'll have to wait until I have some time to switch over from my current work.