Asset Downloader/Manager

When my friends and I were trying to make a game in Unreal Engine 5 we had a problem with version control (which is easily resolved by a good gitignore file) and asset sharing.

Because actor and map files can grow rapidly I had an idea to use some kind of a cloud, the easiest thing I thought of was using Google Drive (mostly because of its free 15GB limit). As my friends worked on Windows and only had access to MSYS2, Git Bash, Cygwin and WSL I decided to do it in Bash using JSON files as the “registries”. The asset registry files were located in the repo and tracked by Git while the asset files were downloaded locally. Also you can add pre-commit hooks so there is a check if you have all the assets downloaded. After a few tweaks and fixes, it wasn’t too shabby. In fact the script did its job quite well. If you are interested in the code, you can find it here. I may add some small updates to it, but nothing special.

The main limitation was that Bash is a scripting language and it has its own tweaks. And I wanted more functionality. So, I decided to rebuild the idea with a better architecture using Golang and YAML.

Right now, I don’t have the funds or a way to host a server, so it’ll use regular archives for now. In the future, I want to use hashing for optimization (similar to how Git works). It’s still in early development, but you can find the repo here.