Include the Defold version in the project files

Feature requests
#1

It’d be great to have an indication within the files of a Defold project what version of the engine/editor it was last opened with. This is useful for a number of reasons:

  • When updating an old project to a new version of Defold, you will know which release notes to read to see what has changed and should therefore be updated in the project.
  • Very few previous versions of the editor are available to download (separate request: have all older versions available, perhaps at https://d.defold.com/archive/ rather than /stable to make it clear they aren’t supported)
  • By default a project will be using many of the assets in the built-ins section, but these can and do change between versions so it’s important to be aware of what has changed (for this reason I’ve now copied the built-ins I was using, so that I have a fixed version in the project)

Within the ProjectSettings folder of a Unity project is a ProjectVersion.txt file, for example:

m_EditorVersion: 2019.3.1f1
m_EditorVersionWithRevision: 2019.3.1f1 (89d6087839c2)

This is extremely helpful when upgrading a project, or for knowing which version of the editor to install if you don’t want to or can’t upgrade.

This could just be added inside the game.project file at the root of each Defold project. Since Defold updates are very frequent it may be more beneficial to have it as a separate file similar to Unity to avoid unnecessary source control noise on the game.project file.

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#2

Connor, thank you for the feature request. Could I ask that you create this on GitHub as well and link to it here?

4 Likes
#3

This could be done with editor scripts as well though it would require one of the triggers to run the generation it should be reasonably reliable.

1 Like
#4

Sure, here you go:

Is it preferable to request features through GitHub then, rather than on the forum?

1 Like
#5

Re: making older versions of the engine/editor available for download, I’ve realised that they are available through the GitHub releases page, just not from the Defold download page. So I guess this is already solved, although linking to the GitHub releases page for older versions from the download page would be helpful.

#6

Not sure yet. The forum is a good place to discuss feature requests, but at some point the discussion should be moved to GitHub before any actual work starts.

The Defold Download page (d.defold.com) will keep the last 180 days of releases (stable, beta and dev builds). GitHub Releases will show all stables releases from now until someone at GitHub complains that we are using too much disk space :slight_smile:

3 Likes