Lately, my version control costs have gone up because I’ve committed all my marketplace assets to my repo, but is this really necessary?
With a few exceptions, couldn’t most assets be dropped in after cloning the repo via “Add to Project” in the UE Launcher? At least assuming we’re solo developing; this would of course not work when collaborating with a teammate who doesn’t own the marketplace asset.
This is the approach you take in web development with languages like Python and JavaScript. For example if I want to use pandas or react in my web-application, I don’t actually commit all that source code to my repo. It’s installed in a folder called venv or node_modules which is .gitignored. After cloning the repo, I run pip install or npm install to get all my dependencies on my local machine.
Couldn’t the UE Launcher be used to do the same thing? Would a better approach be to not actually write to any of the content coming from the marketplace, and instead copy/subclass anything I need to adjust and only commit that?
For example, I installed Spectrum Galaxy. After hitting “Add to Project,” this adds a folder called Galaxy to the Content folder. Would it be feasible to add Content/Galaxy to my .gitignore, and create a level in my non-ignored folders that reference the assets from the ignored Content/Galaxy directory?
Can I expect this to work if I clone the repo, and add the asset back via the UE Launcher? Or are there “hardcoded” references in .uasset files that would require manually stitching things back together?