Hello,
this topic is for sure not new, but the asset system of the Unreal Engine really needs to be reworked. It’s inacceptable that deleting or renaming assets takes minutes. It’s absolutely impossible to reorganize the assets in a somewhat larger project unless you want to spend days with it.
I don’t know what the Unreal Engine makes in the background, but I am sure that sometimes there is a timer which says “rename only 1 asset per second” as it renames exactly every second one asset. This only says me that the asset system is really not well thought out - and optimizing it could for sure minimize the time needed for renaming/deleting/reorganizing assets from minutes and seconds to milliseconds.
The asset system absolutely does not go with the modernity of the Unreal Engine and to rework it should be on one of the first places on the to-do-list. Or in other words: It’s really annoying that such a modern engine has such a extremely bad asset system.
Thank you,
Thilo
Everytime you rename, move, or delete an asset the engine needs to update ALL references for that asset.
A good example is say you have a map with a tree sm (SM_WillowTree). If you rename the tree sm then all references in the map for that tree need to be updated. Otherwise you’d load the map and none of your tree sm’s would load. SM_WillowTree no longer exists.
When you start a project your first step should be defining an asset naming convention and structure, then sticking to it. It’s work, but it’s part of the process.
https://www.ue4community.wiki/Legacy…ing_Convention
I am sure this can be implemented efficiently. This are not very CPU intensive operations, so it should not take minutes or even seconds. This is not a realistic physics calculation or the evaluation of 10 million linear systems, which can take minutes. It’s searching in a tree or another data structure and usually this is done in almost no time if the right data structures are used the right way. No way that with a well thought out asset system this can take more than a second.
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The asset system is what makes large projects possible.
You think that’s a lot, but there are AAA engines out there that will take at least 2 days to “cook” a large project when you delete or rename an asset; studios ship with tons of unused meshes in the game simply because they can’t afford the time necessary to delete an asset…
Operations on hdd are super slow.
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