I have tried maps, meshes, skeletons and physics assets and the behavior is the same. If I click the Save button on the toolbar in the editor associated with the asset, the file changes on disk even though I have not made any changes to the asset itself (as indicated by the absence of an asterisk next to the asset’s name).
I am using Git for source control at the moment but that is somewhat irrelevant. I shouldn’t have to rely on the source control system to protect me from the Unreal Editor creating phantom revisions. I can understand having the ability to force a save but if the asset has not changed, the file after the forced save should be identical to what is was before.
Our organization is evaluating Unreal at the moment and one of the things we are trying to figure out is what our workflow would look like. As it stands, it seems that the advice we would have to give artists, designers, etc. is to:
- Avoid using Save buttons at all. Use File->Save All instead. (Of course that may result in saving files that have what are meant to be temporary changes.)
- If you want to save a specific asset, double check to make sure there is an asterisk next to its name before clicking Save.
- Try to remember what assets you have actually changed and make sure you revert any phantom changes before committing to source control.
- Good luck if changes to one asset propagate to another asset. (I am not familiar enough with Unreal to know if that ever happens but I can think of several cases where it could.)
- Be aware that source control changelists may not accurately represent the changes meant to be captured by the commit.
- Buy extra drives for servers to store what are basically duplicate copies of assets.