Background
Our team is facing a division of labour problem: once new character animations are produced, we have effects artists wanting to add particle notifies, a sound engineer adding sound notifies and gameplay programmers adding custom notifies to hook into blueprints & code.
None of these should interfere with each other, but they’re all contained within the same AnimSequence .uasset file checked into Perforce.
The question
Currently, UE4Editor’s -diff command allows sensible comparison of AnimSequence.uassets by converting them to a text-based format, then passing it off to a diff tool of choice (in my case, P4Merge). This is really helpful for version control with our workflow.
It’s also theoretically possible to do a merge operation with 2 files and a common base, but it just pops up a message box saying “AnimSequence asset files can not be merged. Run ‘-diff -h’ for more help.”. Since the external tool would handle merging the text, all that’s left is that the editor doesn’t support converting from the text format it produced back to binary .uasset data.
Is there any support planned for this, or reason it definitely can’t be done? Of course I’d expect it to be really strict and just fail on any input that’s not well-formed - anything’s better than nothing.
Otherwise, is there any sensible way to let artists add effects to version-controlled animations without blocking everyone else?