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

[kalms]

Hi,

I was thinking a bit more about option #2 (native Unity serialization) recently.

I think you could accomplish this by creating an alternative to the FullSerializer, which would be a NativeUnityObjectSerializer. It would contain a set of serializable Unity objects which are just enough to represent the constructs that can exist within a JSON structure. Then, the places in the code where you call JSONSerializer.Serialize() / JSONSerializer.Deserialize(), you would not assign the results to a string field – you would assign it to a serialized-root-object-ref instead.

In order to not break backwards compatibility you would need to keep both the existing FullSerializer and the new NativeUnityObjectSerializer alive in parallel. At load time you would then have to try loading both kinds of data from the asset; at write time you only write one of the types.

It is a fair bit more work than the other options, absolutely. However, I think it is worth considering again.