Mod Revision and Merging Management - Team Mod Building Tool

[Greendogo]

One of the things I've always thought the original engine and construction kit were poorly equipped for was building mods in a team.

From looking at Tamriel Rebuilt, you can see that they've really had to go outside of the original tools to control their modding work-flow and they have done a stellar job in that regard. They've mostly had to moderate their methods and their planning to fit the fact that they don't have built-in tools to make this an easier process. Beyond this, they've also had to rebuild their website, in many ways, in order to combat against this disorder and non-control.

However, as I'm sure many of you coders here will know, when working in teams/groups it is often a pain to rely on the expectation of others to follow set procedures in order to prevent disaster from striking at your larger projects. For projects that aren't as large as TR, building your own tools to manage this chaos is also prohibitively "expensive".

Programming relies on automatic revision tracking and tools that help us merge and track contributions from multiple team members.

My proposal is to try to leverage the core placement of our new OpenMW Editor in modding workflows and give teams more control with revision and merge management tools, and a preferred organizing structure for large amounts of data (meshes, textures, etc.) in databases that can be connected to and used in the same way that coding repositories are (think Git, etc).

I think most of these ideas are already in the OpenMW "plan", but I was interested in hearing from others, especially people from large projects like TR, what kinds of tools or features could be built into the OpenMW ecosystem to make team projects easier.

[GameEnder]

Man you beat me to posting this Idea. I was just thinking about this Idea the other day, on how having Git support in editor would make creating mods like Tamriel Rebuilt or Project Tamriel a lost easier to manage.

Especially if you could export records from the esp/esm to Git and be able to manage creating, merging and overriding records using Git. Then pull it all back together in the editor instead of having to hand esp's around and using a external tool to merge them to make the complete mod.

[heilkitty]

To have record merging you'd have to either implement this in the editor, or have a text format addons, so Git would merge 'em.

[Greendogo]

To be clear, I'm not saying we need Git support, but "revision control". Git is revision control, but revision control is not necessarily Git.

[AnyOldName3]

I imagine quite a few people would like to be able to use their version control system of choice, though. For that, either we'd need it to be possible to convert content files to a text-based representation, so normal diff tools would work, or (if it's normal to be able to select custom diff tools for the most popular version control systems) implement something easy to access from a terminal. As for implementation details for something like that, I'm pretty sure a plugin file is already pretty comparable to a diff between a master file and some state after a set of changes, so I'd imagine quite a bit of work could be reused.