Reply To: Request: Make assets easier to diff in source code form

[kalms]

Hi,

Some more thoughts on this. This is all based on an older version than 2.70 by the way, so some of these points might be obsolete by now.

1. If you separate out the viewing parameters, i.e. current window and zoom factor, and store those in native Unity serialized fields, then it will be a lot easier for users to tell the difference between “I opened a graph and looked around in it” and “I opened a graph and made some modifications to its content” when diffing .asset files.

2a. I understand that this is probably a major undertaking, but, serializing the entire graph with Unity’s Serializable types will instantly lead to the data becoming more easily diffable and mergable. Perhaps there is a way to store the graph description as a sort of a data description instead of a functional object structure, but in Serializable types? It might lead to a need for code generation (generating a Serializable type for each node type, to enable Unity to be able to serialize/deserialize them), not sure.

(2b. Another option could be to store the JSON content in a text file separate from the .asset. It would allow the JSON to be stored as a pretty-printed normal text file. This makes it more cumbersome for users since each graph will be a pair of files instead of just one. Probably not worth it for most people.)