Game's .exe does not open after the export

[signal gazelle]

the game literally just open's for a brief moment and closes immediately and i don't understand why
when i launch the game in debug mode it briefly shows a red warning which i can't even read because te game closes too fast
I also have no errors while testing the game in the editor

managed to catch the error with a screenshot

[signal gazelle]

i still have no freaking clue what's wrong

[onyx plover]

the error says that your main scene failed to load a speciffic resource file. you can exclude resource files from export so it could be that one you needed misses.

my bad, it specifically states that it was unable to load the resource because it's missing the speciffic resource loader.
Although the path looks a bit weird. usually you just use uid:// instead of res://, not combine them both.
you can use the uid to check which file it tried to load using Methods of the ResourceUID-signleton.

[signal gazelle]

could you explain what each of these mean
i am guessing res is like game's folder since every path to an asset starts with it but i never heard about uid up to this point
and i am pretty sure i never had any file with this gibberish name

[onyx plover]

the default way files are structured is using the project folder, where each file has a unique path. Files can be accessed that way using the res:// file system. But in that case if you move a file, every reference to that file would break. that's why godot internally uses Unique IDs to reference resources, so when a file gets moved, it can search for the file with the correct UID and update the path.
that string of "random" numbers is just the uid of the resource, kinda how Youtube URLs work. this is done so even though you could represent it more efficiently with an integer, both can be used with the same loading methods.

[cunning vault]

The same thing happens when I export to android

[onyx plover]

only when exporting to android?

[cunning vault]

Yeah
But when I export to windows I works perfectly

[signal gazelle]

and i am trying to export to windows

and this occurs

[signal gazelle]

thanks for the explanation but is there a way i can search a file by that ID so i can remove it for good?
i even tried packaging specific scenes with just their dependencies but i still get the error
it's hard to spot it

[onyx plover]

ResourceUID.text_to_id() turns the uid://-string into the corresponding number, then use ResourceUID.get_id_path() to get the normal file path of the resource.

so the string would be uid://cpxkffy21a1yq

[signal gazelle]

it led me to my main menu
i removed it and now i have this

is there a way one could like.. actualize the path so it stops being an uid and gets a regular path

i feel like if i keep going with these errors i will delete the whole project

ye now it says the problem is my main scene

good lord

@onyx plover

how come it launches just fine in the editor but errors in the build

[onyx plover]

Was the menu your main scene? As in the one the game automatically loads at the start.

[signal gazelle]

yes the main menu was the main scene
after the error led me to it i deleted main menu and made my main level a new main scene so it loads first

[onyx plover]

I know of a couple file related reasons why a project wouldn't work on export.
For one load() and ResourceLoader.load() don't work on exported projects by default.
Also while file paths in windows aren't case sensitive, they are in Unix systems like linux, android, MacOS and IOS.
but neither of these point should be relevant to the main scene.

since you don't do anything aside from choosing the main scene, i'm also unsure what you personally could have done to cause the issue. Consequently i also don't know what you could do to fix it.

[signal gazelle]

well i had my scenes in res://assets/scenes but then i moved scenes folder and got res://content/assets/scenes

i updated all the paths i used in code

i didn't know it would f things up

[onyx plover]

well does it work now?

[signal gazelle]

no
i did not delete my main level to see if it works now

pretty sure it won't

since i deleted main menu

it just changed the error

so probably all the scenes i have just won't work

because of that uid crap

because i moved them to a different folder

i also tried to export another project i worked on a while ago and it worked

so the problem really is the moved scenes folder

[onyx plover]

well to check if it's really because of uid you could create a new scene in the project and don't move it. then make it the main scene.

[signal gazelle]

okay i'll try that
but if it actually is uid related how do i fix it with the rest of the scenes ?

i really don't feel like deleting the whole project and start from scratch for it to work

[onyx plover]

i read online that just opening and saving the scenes again in the editor should fix it. but that sounds a bit too easy to be true

[signal gazelle]

no way this is the case
i literally spam ctrl s everywhere i can all the time

[onyx plover]

yeah, and the error they get also doesn't match, so it's probably not the same.

[signal gazelle]

so
i just made a completely new scene and made it the main scene
and yet it still gives me an error
now it's failing to load or reference that new scene and i never moved it anywhere around

[onyx plover]

seems like it's a problem with the scene file then. could you post the file here?
by default scenes are just text files, so i could check if there is something off with the uid.

[onyx plover]

and this was the main scene that triggered the latest error?

i also just realised that you are using a beta of godot 4.4. of course that would be more bug-prone in general.

[signal gazelle]

i know but i built another project with it and it worked properly

[signal gazelle]

technically this was the last

but they all give the same error

each corresponding to each one's uid id

[onyx plover]

yeah, you could try going into the file with a simple text editor and removing the uid="uid://..." line. that should force the editor to create a new one.

and could you maybe also send one of the main scenes that worked?

[signal gazelle]

did that and rebuilt the project with that scene as main
still gives me an error but now with a different id
still the id belongs to that scene

[onyx plover]

i guess that was to be expected. but i then doubt that it's actually because of the uid.

which scene worked?

[signal gazelle]

it's not like a scene that worked in THAT project but another project built correctly without errors

[onyx plover]

could you show me the scene from there?

[signal gazelle]

yes sec

[signal gazelle]

here

[onyx plover]

okay i found a weird difference between those broken files and the one you sent me, as well as my own scenes that work properly.
the broken ones have this at the end of the file for some reason:

"
horizontal_alignment = 1

you could try removing those 2 lines and check if it works.

[signal gazelle]

well it just makes the scene unusable all together

[onyx plover]

welp

[signal gazelle]

it just gives new errors

[onyx plover]

yeah i also just now realised that it also isn't in the first broken scene you sent me. probably was just because the scene contained a label.
My bad

[signal gazelle]

welp happens

is there any place i can report this as a bug

so maybe it gets patched in the future

if it is actually engine's bug and not my stupidity

[onyx plover]

Yeah you usually open an issue post here on the GitHub.
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues
I already looked for someone having similar problems, but didn't find any.

Even if it's not a bug it's definetly so unintuitive behaviour that it should be changed regardless.

[signal gazelle]

i just tried to make a minimal error reproducing project and the error disappeared
i have no freaking clue why

[onyx plover]

so you used one of your broken scenes and put them inside an epty project and it no longer had the problem?

[signal gazelle]

i made a new scene in that same scenes folder and it no longer has any problems
the point is that the last scene i sent you was created in that folder and it had the error

i don't understand anything anymore

[onyx plover]

oh, a Folder creating this issue. how does the folder name/path look like?

[signal gazelle]

exactly like this

[onyx plover]

i really hope that the upper case Folder names don't cause this problem.

[signal gazelle]