I also wanted to post a quick note about the JsonAssets plugin. There has been more progress on UTXT assets. First I took the time to compare some different engine versions, and didn’t realize that a few things were updated in 4.24 for text assets.
However while they completely changed the text format itself in 4.24 and fixed a few random bugs (such as text assets not loading in the content browser unless referenced by a binary asset that’s being loaded) mostly everything else remained the same in terms of everything being completely unfinished and unusable. Plus none of this really matted since the JsonAssets plugin already fixed many of these existing engine issues.
The initial plan was to only work with UTXT asset in-editor and then require these files to be converted to UASSET before cooking your game. This could have been taken a step further by automating the process so it temporarily renames UTXT assets while saving UASSET versions for cooking and then resetting everything afterwards. But this is not a good design plan and wasn’t really the long term goal.
Now the thing is UTXT files are not supported by cooked builds, and quite frankly that is probably a really good design decision anyway. So if we’re not going to allow UTXT assets to even be cooked, there was only one clear solution which I’m happy to report we got working…
This is of course still being able to utilize UTXT assets, but then having them cooked as UASSET files directly. That means there’s no changes to your content directory itself, and everything takes place during the cooking process instead.
So now with this new update we’ll be able to work with raw text-based UTXT assets using JSON, then package for ANY platform, and have all this data cooked as binary UASSET files. Unfortunately this did delay the actual release of the JsonAssets plugin as some of this new functionality is being tested really quick. But it seemed like the right decision to just put everything together the right way like this instead of having something half-finished (kinda like the engine devs) with weird workarounds for cooking.