Hi all. I’ve been building BlueprintReview, a standalone viewer and diff tool for Blueprints. I first posted about it in the feedback thread. It’s now in a public beta, so I’m giving it a topic here.
I built it because the workflow of Blueprint keeps stopping me. In Git or P4V a changed Blueprint shows up as “binary files differ”. To see what changed, someone has to open the editor with both versions synced, and the editor could take a long time to launch. And other times, you just want to inspect some blueprints from some old projects and copy/paste some logic to your current one and it would be much nicer to open them quickly without worrying immigrating old projects to the latest unreal engine version. Trust me, I know all the headache.
BlueprintReview reads .uasset files directly, without the editor, the project or an engine install. It draws them the way the Blueprint editor does: event graphs, functions, macros and collapsed graphs, plus My Blueprint, Components, Details, Class Defaults and Class Settings. Enums, structs and data tables open too. You can copy nodes and paste them into the editor or blueprintue.com.
The diff shows the two versions side by side in the editor’s diff colours, with a Changes list to step through. Nodes and pins are matched by their IDs, not their positions. So a moved node, a re-routed wire, or a value re-saved differently after an engine upgrade isn’t reported as a real change.
It also works with the tools you already use. One command sets it up as your git difftool, and as a textconv driver, so git diff and git log -p show a readable outline instead of “binary”. P4V can use it from its diff settings. A file’s history from Git or Perforce shows as a Time-lapse, like P4V’s. You can also open a whole Content folder, search every Blueprint in it, and double-click a function call to open the Blueprint that defines it.
BlueprintReview is very lightweight and fast. Some numbers from a large UE5 sample project (3,890 assets, 240 of them Blueprints): opening and indexing the folder takes 0.31 s. Opening its largest asset, a 1,871-node Control Rig, takes 33 ms. Find in Blueprints across all of it takes 15 ms. I check the parser against the editor’s own export with a companion plugin, and all 56 test assets match on 5.8.
What it doesn’t do:
- Cooked or packaged assets. Cooking strips the graphs, so there’s nothing left to draw.
- Platforms other than Windows 10/11 for now. The browser version runs anywhere, and macOS is next.
The app reads files locally and sends nothing anywhere. The browser version runs in WebAssembly, so it doesn’t upload files either.
Everything is free during the beta.
- Download and details: https://blueprintreview.efenggamedev.com/
- Try it in your browser, no install: BlueprintReview
- User guide: Overview · BlueprintReview docs
If a Blueprint draws wrong or won’t open, please send me the file or a screenshot, and tell me which engine version saved it. That’s the most useful bug report I can get.
Two questions for teams. How do you review Blueprint changes today? And if you use Perforce, would you be willing to try the P4V setup on your server and give me feedback? Thanks.