I’m basing my understanding off of what was posted above me in the thread, where somebody mentioned having to move a .meta file around as well.
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That’s completely incorrect and you don’t understand how that works.
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You misunderstood. My point was if there was no Redirector there and we still used paths for referencing, then I’d have to check the level out and change the path, then check it back in with a string pointing to the new path. Otherwise you open level, it looks for file at path ‘x’ and it’s not there. I had to deal with this ALL the time when the guy doing parts of our UI kept moving textures and materials around, but he couldn’t submit UMG assets for example because other people were working on them. As soon as he submitted and anybody else updated and opened their project, everything broke. Perhaps after spending so much time trying to fix broken projects because people couldn’t submit full changelists, I grew more fond of redirectors…
Sorry for the drama, but I get wound up when somebodies argument initially seems as thinly veiled as ‘Well Unity does it this way and I’ve had a problem with it in Unreal, so Unreal must be broken’.
Unique GUID in assets would probably be a good solution, I agree. Frankly until someone from Epic who really knows what they’re talking about comes and posts here, nobody knows for sure.
EDIT: One issue with storing the GUID in the .Uasset file is that unless you can specify a way to load only a small chunk of the file, you’d have to load the whole thing to get the GUID. This means every time you start up a project, all assets would be loaded into memory and 9/10 times, you’ll probably run out.
Not to say it can’t be done, but right now storing all this data externally sounds like this only option which is something I’d personally like to steer away from.