How to merge NvPhysX branches?

hi, i hope if someone can help me to merge VolumetricLighting, HBAO+ and VXGI2 in unreal… i downloaded all of them and they are working fine but i didn’t know they’d be separated engines…! plus the size is big on each…
so please tell me how can i merge them (without coding) for version 4.19 or 4.20…
thanks.

HBAO+ is included in VXGI2-4.19 and is also a much more extensive set of changes than the volumetrics changes. So, the best way to handle this, that I’ve found, is to clone the NV UE4 repo into separate local folders so you can check out the relevant branch for each.

If you have a heavily customized UE4 codebase as it is: yay you can manually merge both into your codebase. If not, just use the VXGI2 4.19 branch as your starting point. Though, worth noting: it hasn’t been updated to 4.20 yet, so you may also want to start with the most recent 4.20 codebase from Epic and integrate both branch’s changes manually.

The major thing to be on the lookout for is that every NV-based change is demarcated by a common comment start/end line: for the volumetrics branch the starting line is: [FONT=courier new]NVCHANGE_BEGIN and the end line is: [FONT=courier new]NVCHANGE_END. VXGI may be the same way — I can’t remember — but I know that the Blast convention is not the same (I think it uses [FONT=courier new]#blast). So, what I generally do is do a find-in-solution for every file with [FONT=courier new]NVCHANGE, identify individual files, and then do a folder compare on the [FONT=courier new]Engine/Source/Runtime folder in Beyond Compare for each of those files and step through it.

NOTE: There will be additional files on the NV-side (Blast is a Plugin, Volumetrics has a handful of engine-side files, a third-party folder file set, and a third-party binary folder file set. You’ll need those too.

Since my UE4 codebase is smörgåsbord of changes all over the place, I just got accustomed to manually integrating these changes and then watching over commits to each NV-side branch to see what changes after the point of my integration. It’s a pain the first time, but eventually the turnaround (even for full integration of another GameWorks tech) isn’t bad at all.

as a start for my humble start i were so happy to see at least HBAO+ and VXGI2 are already mixed…
i understood everything i thank you so much for your time, i see this as you said is a pain so i will download VXGI and VolLighting separately to experiment with them and see what will i get out of it…
thanks again

Without coding? You can hope someone else does it for you. Otherwise use a merge tool, or go over the changes by hand.