I'm dreading the upcoming #godot4 dev5 update. Adding a new .uid meta file for EVERY script is going to pollute the filesystem & commits like crazy for the sake of sort of helping some users not footgun by moving files around in an external editor. godotengine.org/article/dev-... - ThreadSky

wick.works • 94 days ago

I'm dreading the upcoming #godot4 dev5 update. Adding a new .uid meta file for EVERY script is going to pollute the filesystem & commits like crazy for the sake of sort of helping some users not footgun by moving files around in an external editor.

https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-4-dev-5/

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wick.works•94 days ago

I don't have a better solution for the footgun, but this won't even eliminate it because those users can still mess up by not moving both the original AND the .uid file.

wick.works•94 days ago

So who is this change for? People who want to regularly refactor by dragging things around in windows explorer instead of in the editor? The current plot arc is that you try to do that once while learning godot, see that it explodes, and learn to not do it again.

wick.works•94 days ago

Making the engine environment worse for all users for the sake of smoothing out that one learning bump is inexplicable to me.

I must not be seeing something. Or maybe the maintainers have been hearing the same complaint for years and want to make this wild swing to try and help with it.

kimmoke.bsky.social•94 days ago

I really hope the tiny .uid files won't really be noticeable on anything (load times, disk space), but of course that would vary from project to project and it'd be neat to see some actual profiling related to it.

kimmoke.bsky.social•94 days ago

I'm very new to Godot, but I've gathered that yeah, the complaints have been popping up across time for the devs (based on what I've read here and there).

As a newbie on my own figuring out Godot, I broke some projects likely somehow related to this and it shook me off for months.

wick.works•94 days ago

That's a good perspective — do you think that if there were some .uid files sitting in their folders as well you would have independently figured out to carefully move them as well?

kimmoke.bsky.social•93 days ago

At the very least, if a new user breaks their project by moving only the asset and not its .uid, there's a very clear clue and it's sure to be mentioned widely online soon if one ends up searching for the cause. I don't even really know why or how I broke my projects, path-based refs are fragile.

kimmoke.bsky.social•93 days ago

I'm not a neutral person to ask - I have plenty experience in Unity, so it's very analogous to their .meta files which I am very familiar and aware of - I would definitely move identically named some_asset.res and some_asset.res.uid simultaneously. I don't think I'd broken my proj if it had UIDs.

wick.works•94 days ago

I'm too far into Lancer Tactics (dev started the same month Godot 4 dropped!) to get off the update boat now, but I have HUNDREDS of script files so the file weight of the project is going to be hugely impacted. I love #godot but this feels like a rare big miss by them.

hauntedbees.com•94 days ago

I'm debating sticking with 4.4dev4 for a while just to see how this whole thing plays out (and hoping they backtrack on it immediately), but I also kind of want to try this just to see if it's truly as bad as it seems, or if I'll be annoyed by it for a few minutes before getting used to it.

wick.works•94 days ago

I'm sure we can get used to it... but one of my favorite things about Godot is how lightweight & cruft-free it is compared to larger engines. Some straw for the camel who was previously pretty unburdened.

hauntedbees.com•94 days ago

I say this as not a game engine dev so maybe it should be taken with a grain of salt, but I feel like it shouldn't be THAT hard to, if files are moved around outside of Godot, go "ah res://a/b/c/spaghetti.gd was deleted, and res://d/e/spaghetti.gd was created, maybe they're the same."

wick.works•94 days ago

I've seen one proposal to do just that instead: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/11223

hauntedbees.com•94 days ago

Like, it wouldn't be a perfect system if you moved a file, also renamed it, AND significantly changed its contents all before switching back to Godot, but it could cover a lot of cases. And the uid file solution isn't flawless either, as you said with the "what if they don't move the uid file" flaw.

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