Source code version control is actually such an amazing tool. I wish other industries had similar uses. Like, I'd love to be able to do the equivalent of git blame for 3D objects or vector graphics and see what else changed for that version and trace the "why" for the change.
I'm getting more acquainted with this codebase and seeing where a particular line got added in the history can make such a difference.
@ireneista Oh? Do you have a writeup somewhere? Which information medium are you targeting? Text? Would love to learn more.
I think a lot of version control energy is being put into real time collaboration via stuff like automerge which IMO is great but makes the history less useful for human understanding.
@mauve sigh we do but it's not really online right now... it was conceived in a manic episode and the documentation is badly organized, and has been through a few format migrations
uh, it would be a binary schema format for dependently typed object graphs. so you'd be able to define a schema for any existing file format, and with sufficient annotations you could get pretty structure editing, structural diff, all that nice stuff.
@mauve it is possible we will be able to make this happen within this lifetime. possible.
@ireneista @mauve holy hell more of my friends being friends? niceeeeee
though for the record, some formats like GLTF can do this already, it's just JSON after all
@technobaboo @mauve yes, absolutely. our thing would retrofit it onto all file formats, see :D
@ireneista @mauve ah neat, could integrate it with git-bonsai and all when i finish making that :3
@technobaboo @mauve for sure. yours will be finished first. by about twenty years.
@technobaboo @mauve we have other, smaller projects which would also revolutionize the practice of software which are higher priority than this one.
@mauve can always use git-lfs ? the main issue is art repos get freakishly big, git-lfs does a decent job trying to contend with binary files but it will ofc be bigger as a result of using it..
@fleeky IMO the diffing is a key function. You can't really see diffs over large binary files, can you?
What @technobaboo said about diffing GLTF seemed reasonable though.
@mauve @technobaboo ah in blender you *could* do that , but you would have to load the older version blend file --> append model you are diffing , and then have some kind of geo nodes or shader setup that would highlight in some color the diffs ..
although that is just for geometry ,, you would also have to do this for animation , texturing , rigging , physics , images , metaballs , settings , etc etc etc etc ,,
what did technobaboo say? i cant see that ?
@fleeky
https://ordinary.cafe/@technobaboo/114235868752970789 "... for the record, some formats like GLTF can do this already, it's just JSON after all"
@mauve so weird , i can only see partial replies from this thread ,,
random idea , there is an addon called multi-user that actually serializes data blocks in blender so that you can achieve multiplayer .. my foggy brain seems to think there is a way to diff that stream of datablocks somehow ? (datablocks are kinda the base block of data of blend files)
@mauve we've got a thing we would like to build someday that would allow that, but, it kind of requires reworking a huge part of the existing software ecosystem