Plaintext Asset Files

General Feedback & Requests
1

Why are .uasset files stored as binary rather than plain text? They already have a textual representation which is used when copying and pasting blueprints, and which looks decently easy to read and work with.

To me, it seems it would make more sense to just store the files in this text format. I realize this may be a fair amount of work to implement, however I feel that the quality-of-life improvements for any team collaborating on assets would be worth the effort.

Some potential benefits of this approach:

  • Easier to diff two previous revisions
  • Ability to diff and merge assets using external tools
  • Ability to cherry-pick previous changes
  • More efficient version control storage
  • Exclusive checkout on assets would no longer be necessary

If we can’t get this, can we at least have all blueprints/tabs within an asset file separated into multiple files? Dealing with these files has been a pretty major pain point for my team.

2

Many asset types are not compatible with that

3

ASCII uassets format is in active developed.
Or at least under research…

4

If you’re interested, here is a recent talk that mentions the potential introduction of text based assets for the similar reasons you have mentioned: Workflow on Fortnite - Unreal Engine

5

It started at 30:38.

6

Is this feature still planned? Or abandoned?

I̶t̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶m̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶l̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶i̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶ ̶a̶g̶o̶:̶ ̶https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/search?o=desc&p=1&q=TBA&s=committer-date&type=commits
Edit: Never trust github search function. There are more recent commits. git log --all --grep=‘TBA’