Hello everybody!
I have recently started to make small game jam project with friends using Godot. I previously had some experiences with it, but only on solo dev project. I really like it. I recommended it, and we used it on several project with git the following way: we split our project in a lot of small scene to avoid conflict, and everybody works on their branch. We communicate to be sure nobody is working on the same scene.
Now we face problems that could mean the end of our godot usage as a team: After some commit (I’ll say the first one after a fetch), the uid of some random scene changes and will cause merge conflicts. It seems that there is no logic to it, and it leads to a lot of time lost, sometimes file corruption. The faulty commits are then extremely hard to track. Today we worked with godot 4.4 and it was even more painful. We lost a lot of our project.
I really want to continue to work with Godot, but I should say that my teammates were talking about learning other engine (and I want to be clear: the git conflict is our only issue; but we took half our coding time resolving conflict, reverting commit, cherry picking, etc. just so the master branch has something working on it)
If I have to choose between believing that our workflow sucks or that it is impossible to work with Godot in a team, I’m 99% on our skill issue. If you have any solution or advice, thank you! If you work on a team and you never had those kind of problem, that is also good to know!
Best
You must log in or register to comment.
It seems that there is no logic to it, and it leads to a lot of time lost, sometimes file corruption.
I don’t have very much practical experience with Godot, but the jam project I did with a friend uid generating was never random. From what I remember, when changes or conflicts occurred, I was always able to understand why they occurred.
What do you mean by file corruption? On the text files? You mean unfeasible to resolve conflicts or actually corrupted - as in unreadable? I don’t see how the latter would be possible with Git.
Speaking more from my software dev background than actual Godot experience; Making sure to committing and pushing generated scenes and uids or any changes really early and often should mitigate conflicts. Of course that’s only a mitigation, not understanding or resolution though.
I do not like the UID system either, I’d rather fix broken refs myself, than take this mess of a system that pollutes git history.
There is a open proposal to disable the system alltogether, with a fair number of likes, but it seems that the team is not currently convinced to support disabling UIDs in the engine. There is a open PR implementing it, but it is old and I’m not sure if that approach would still work if rebased to current master.
There is also another PR for only disabling generation of separate UID files, but again, no support from the godot team.
If there is no other solution, it might be necessary to maintain a patch which would allow to build godot without UID support, but it would take effort.
Are you committing the import
.importfiles? These contain the import settings for assets, as well as the uids the engine assigned to them.I found this Reddit thread that seems to explain the cache and why the UID changes. The solution seems finnicky though. Just rebuild until they are synced? Thats gotta be complicated with multiple people.
Edit: reading that thread. It looks like this is new with the UIDs and the Godot team is still working it out. Seems really bad tbh. This might make me switch back to Godot 3.x of some kind for my development.
I think this is 4.4 specific, so you could just go back to 4.3 instead of all the way back to 3
Oh the first article I read mentioned UIDs being added in 4 and I just ran with it. Thank you for the info.
