Integrated SCM feature set

Greetings,

I was evaluating the ue4 SCM integration to see if it is worth the transition from our current external setup.
I’ve read about blueprint diffing before and it looks like a nice feature indeed. But unfortunately what i’ve found was sub-optimal at best for our needs.

I was expecting an increase in workflow within team projects, namely easier submittions/syncs of assets and hopefully tools for diffing or even merging certain asset types.
What i found was a system that can diff blueprints, but nothing more. The sync feature from within the content browser doesn’t appear to reload the assets without restarting the editor, so you’re naturally going to have conflicts if you’re not extra careful. The lack of merge or diff abilities for i.e. materials, umaps and blueprint-component setups makes it appear really unhelpful.

It feels so natural to me to have those features if you’re going as far as integrate source control within the editor, so i was a bit stumped to see it at a basic functionality at this point.

What i’m asking is, how’s the development front on that end? Can we expect some of those features, or similar ones, that can really help increase the teams workflow?

Thanks,
wzl

Hi,

I’ll try to address each of your points.

  • The sync feature has recently been expanded to allow syncing of directories/whole projects. If you hare having issues using sync, please submit a bug report here. We do attempt to unload assets when syncing (otherwise the files would be locked by the OS), but the feature is fairly new and not used often internally.
  • We do allow diffing of ‘general’ assets via text-export. However you are correct in stating Blueprints are currently the only asset we have a custom visual diff tool for.
  • As far as I know, we don’t have any plans to introduce merging of assets within the Editor (although I agree it would be a cool feature to add). We have generally found that with Blueprint usage and the multiple-package paradigm that UE4 now uses, contention for resources is fairly rare. We lock files for editing so conflicts between machines should not occur often.

The source control integration is still in active development. For instance, we will be seeing additions like Perforce SSL support coming soon. Please feel free to request any specific features that you think would be useful to your workflow.

We currently don’t have plans to integrate a Git source control provider into the Editor. However there is a Mercurial plugin currently in development by one of our subscribers (see here). In theory if this works then Git support is feasible too.

Thanks for your swift reply!

I’ll go ahead and test the sync issue once more before i’ll file a bug to make sure it is not a mistake on our part.
We’re currently using a git repository to maintain our assets, which cannot lock files from what i can tell.

Speaking of which, since you are using git for your source distributions, are there any plans for git integration for the editor aswell?

Textual diffs seemed, from what i can tell, fairly unhelpful for the most part, but it’s definitely good that it is there.

I’m glad to hear that it is still a work in progress feature, and i’m looking forward to what you guys will come up with in future releases.

As for feature requests, i can, for now, only point to my initial post.

Thanks again,
wzl