Using json files for versioning purposes

So in other engines(i.e. Godot) scene formats are simple versionable files like json files. This is quite pleasing for development and makes it easy to see on github what has changed in the project, a bit like we do with source code. Right now, armory supports json files but only for debugging and only outputs the files when starting a play session.

What I propose is to have the ability to output the json data when we are saving the .blend file so that the scene data, meshes and materials can be versioned.

I can implement it myself but as I want to avoid the pr staying in pr hell, I would like to get the input of the community and the general interest in this kind of “feature”.

P.S.: It would also simplify my work for an external editor for programmers.

1 Like

I would like to get the input of the community and the general interest in this kind of “feature”.

Sounds interesting! A blender scene holds a lot of info though: what info do you plan to store and how it would work?

I don’t get it, armory already export scene to json, if that what you meant, armory then encode this json to .arm format to use for game. Same way you can use json for describing scene in armory/iron

It does export to json/arm but it doesn’t save the scene in json format by default. What I mean is, when you save your project the scene data is saved in the .blend which for solo devs is ok because the use of versioning files is pretty useless. But when you have teams you need to be able to see the modifications to the scene data to pinpoint errors on git push/commit. So I think that when saving our blender project/file we should also save side by side the scene data in json format so that we can easily see from git the modifications to our scene.