I’ve decided to test what cloud saving is. I’ve saved my project to a cloud. After this my project preview running started to take much more time (instead of 2 seconds it became 4-5 seconds). I’ve checked my project folder and it’s size became two time more because ALL assets are duplicated with “2” added to every file name. So a pretty logical idea was that files with “2” are for a cloud saving that’s why i deleted all these files. And what do you think happened? Right - it were files for my local project. Now everything has no graphics in my game. It’s a really unobvious brain dead system.
Now even if i add a sprite to an object manually it says it cant open an image if it’s not in “assets” folder. I have a separate folder for effects for example. And the game forces me to move all these files to one folder?
The cloud saving should not duplicate files in your project. No clue what would have caused that to happen, but if it happens again I would recommend using the “save as” function and save your project to a new folder. It will copy only needed resources and not any duplicates.
As far as keeping your assets in your project folder, yes that is expected and pretty standard for game engines.
Your assets, once added to the project, should remain in the project folder (or a subfolder). This is to avoid issues where you move, rename. or delete files from other folders, then breaking your project. It is also what makes your project portable if you want to move it to another computer or the cloud. This is the same in engines like Unity and Defold.
GDevelop gives you the option to leave the resource in the original folder rather than copy it, but that is then a static path, so you risk running into the issues mentioned above, and similarly you will not be able to move your project to another computer as that asset path won’t exist.