For some reason, my file stopped opening… It says that the file is damaged, but I didn’t do anything with it, it used to work, but I took a break for a month and didn’t work with this file, and now it has stopped working. See photo below:
As you can see, I can select text, but it looks like it’s just spaces…
PLEASE! Help! This project is very dear to me, I don’t know what I can do, it stopped working on its own, I didn’t change the code in Visual Studio and I didn’t touch it…
At some point, something on your computer either opened the json file while it was in use and being saved, or modified the formatting, or the engine itself got closed improperly.
If the JSON file has just tons of invalid byte types, no one will be able to do anything for your project. If you’ve been saving locally, the autosave should occur every time you preview the game (unless you’ve disabled autosave). So it shouldn’t be that old unless you’ve not previewed in a long time.
Outside of that, there is unfortunately not that can be done as far as I know.
Regarding the old autosave, it is maybe related to the problem I have reported few months ago here:
In certain scenarios it seems GDevelop does not create autosave regularly every time the preview is launched.
Regarding the corrupted project file, I’m afraid nothing can be done. It is supposed to be a simple JSON file that any text editor should be able to display especially VS Code. If not even VS Code can open it, then it is very unlikely anyone can recover the data. In the future, create a backup every day and after every major milestone and store the backup in a different folder, USB, cloud.
Judging by the look of that empty file, you better hope autosave will load… Good luck! I use git to track changes to my project, it’s free and (not so) easy to use. But it can be easy to use using some git desktop app I guess.
It’s a command line utility, so you have to type commands to use it. Luckily, there are some GUI apps to simplify the usage, for example Github desktop:
I’m not using it (the desktop app), but this seems like a nice tutorial for beginners:
Good luck! I use git to track changes to my project, it’s free and (not so) easy to use. But it can be easy to use using some git desktop app I guess.