thanks for the response. I went down a similar rabbit hole and can't even access my license for 1.4 anymore after the Opera merge. I thought if I validated the license I could offline use GMAssetCompiler at least for a short time before having to open the IDE again.
I was also trying the live compile on 1.4 and couldn't tell what was causing the project to erase the project XML sections and I think it was circling back to the live compiler and breaking.
I just installed game maker 2. I really didn't want to mess around with a new version but here we are. Of course out of the box it seems project importing just doesn't work.
After some debugging I found out that sprites and sound could be imported if they were in a project alone. The issues arrived when script files came into the equation. The import project stuff seems to never work if there are scripts to convert.
I actually generated most of my 1.4 assets through a conversion script I made that converted Javascript on an opensource project into the game maker XML files.
When moving to 2.X it seems those GMX XML files now contain GUIDs on everything, so a simple conversion didn't seem possible without a way to generate my own GUIDs for game maker to use. I couldn't find any resources on how game maker even made those IDs to make my own.
Luckily, and absurdly, script files are just plain text in 1.4 and 2.X, so it seems I can code my own conversions here. As theres no GUIDs. So thankfully the assets imported.
I have been coding in GM 1.4 for a long time and the UI has made clean code standards very difficult in many different windows.
I am digging this open source IDE approach, even 2.0 has an odd coding interface.
Another oddity in gm 1.4 is after so many sprites texture pages take ages to load. So far it seems 2.0 doesn't suffer in this way. Though, in 1.4 you can 'disable' entire pages which is helpful (except you can't see the sprites...).
Anywho, hopefully 2.0 works out better.