It would be great if we could move content that we purchased from the Marketplace, to another folder within our content folder, and still keep the ability to update the purchased items easily (using the “Update” button from the launcher library).
As it stands, I have purchased ~20 things from the marketplace and I don’t think anyone is going to work with those all stored in the root content directory. So I move them in the content browser to a proper location and fixup redirects etc before adding them to source control. It’s OK - but after that you can’t update the packs directly any more because you moved the assets? You’d have to add it to a new project, export them all manually to source files and reimport manually.
Not sure of the best solution… perhaps a “permanent redirector” in the root Content directory that tells the launcher where you moved the pack to in your content folder? Which fixup redirects doesn’t affect, unless you pass a “-includepermanent” option with it? (so you can still fixup those redirects at the end of development for performance/cleanliness).
Actually leaving them in the root folder is perfectly viable, if you just do one simple thing that seems obvious, but most people never think of it - move all your game-related stuff to Content/GameName. That way it never mixes with anything from the marketplace and everything is completely modular and isolated.
I can’t really agree with that. In a large project you really need to be able to group assets properly - some are for environment, some are animation, weapons, UI, FX… these things don’t all go in a root folder together.
I am not sure what you consider large project, but we’ve been working on a 50k+ assets 300GB+ project for a while now and this is by far the only approach I could fathom. Most of the asset packs we use are temporary things though (animpacks to use in-place until our animators get around to doing bespoke stuff etc.). It’s been very useful to just be able to add all the marketplace stuff in the “directories to never cook” array. We could never do that if they weren’t completely separate from all our game stuff. But even the stuff we do use we want very much separate from our own assets for easier housekeeping.