Hey,
So, me and the rest of my team at work have been moaning about the problem with Blueprint-Assets in combination with Git when it comes to Merging for a very long time. This sparked the idea, that I would try to create some system, e.g., A Unreal-Plugin or Git-Submodule, which would address those concerns.
In the last few days, I began to improve and research my ideas and make some more concrete plans on what and how I would want to achieve with this system. I stumbled across TextBasedAssets, which was an idea to store .uasset-files in a Text-Based format instead of the current binary format. Although this would not magically remove all difficulties when it comes to merging, it would at least give us the ability to try to merge.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any recent (reliable) information about this topic, the current state of development or if this goal is still (actively) pursued by the development team. The last commit on this topic was around 2 years.
So the big questions are:
- Is the idea of TextBasedAssets still being pursued, or was the idea abandoned in favor of a visual merger (inside the Editor)
- If you ignore issues like wrong merges resulting in erroneous formatting, is there anything that would make a system like that not possible? Are there any Blueprints, that we would be unable to be unable to save as text? (Materials, Animations, etc.)
- Similarly: What was the reasoning behind choosing a binary encoding? Just because the files would be smaller and prevent users from tampering with the files and produce a broken blueprint?