While doing a lot of work in Godot, I recently ran across an interesting error. I was attempting to upgrade from using Godot 4.1, which was the version used in my Udemy class on Godot, to the newer version 4.2.1. After downloading the newer version of Godot, everything seemed to load up fine, I could launch the games that I made in the editor, but I couldn’t manage to make an export that worked. I tried exporting as Linux and Windows binaries, as well as exporting as a web application, but to no avail. All of them didn’t work.
If you launched it with a console, you would see this error:
ERROR: Pack created with a newer version of the engine: 4.2.
at: try_open_pack (core/io/file_access_pack.cpp:205)
Error: Couldn't load project data at path ".". Is the .pck file missing?
If you've renamed the executable, the associated .pck file should also be renamed to match the executable's name (without the extension).Further, thinking that maybe my old 4.1 projects just couldn’t convert to 4.2 for some reason, I tried building a new 4.2 project and exporting it, but it didn’t work either! I scoured the internet, as well as the Godot issue tracker, trying dozens of settings, and nothing seemed to work. I had spent nearly 2 hours trying everything under the sun to make this export properly, and just couldn’t do it.
But, praise God, the issue was actually pretty easy to solve once I realized what the problem was! If you upgrade your Godot version in Linux (maybe on Windows as well, but in Linux for sure), you need to download the newer build templates for your updated version!
When I first started using Godot, it forced me to download export templates for version 4.1 before I could export anything. But after upgrading to 4.2.1, it didn’t ask me to update my build templates, it didn’t error when building with 4.1 build templates, it just built the export files, knowing they wouldn’t work. I find that strange behavior, but I’m glad I figured out how to “fix” it. All you have to do is go to Editor -> Manage Export Templates -> and click “Download and Install” to get the latest template. I also recommend deleting the old templates, but that is just me.
I think if I had done the upgrade on my projects on a new computer that only had the latest Godot version, this issue would not have come up, but I am glad that I saw it so I could learn something about the way this works!
Linux – keep it simple.