One thing that is annoying about dev tools like Tiled or Aseprite is that they don't warning you if you open a read-only file. Version control uses this flag to say the file is locked. You accidentally open a locked file and make a bunch of changes, get a save warning, then unlock the file and it pulls down new changes and you overwrite them.
@grumpygamer dang I did not realize SVN was still around too. I tend to think of my open source maintainer role as keeping me in touch with weird old tech but I guess this is a blind spot!
I agree with the defect though even if this specific presentation doesn’t bother me: I don’t care about file locking but I do care about merge conflicts, and the fundamental problem beyond the implementation detail here is that these tools are designed for single-user scenarios.
@grumpygamer any new dev tool at this point really ought to assume that it’s going to be used in a collaborative way and make conflict resolution a first-class part of the tool. Shipping a git merge driver is not hard (although actually implementing binary 3-way merge on arbitrary asset data structures is left as an exercise for the reader.)
@grumpygamer@glyph auto-reload discarding your local changes would be a bug in the application really? A VCS would be a likely trigger, but this happens if you directly edit stuff over Dropbox for instance.
@TTimo@grumpygamer I believe the issue being described is the opposite: save (and commit) destroys the remote changes. Which is definitely the trademarked Perforce Experience I remember
@grumpygamer well, git won't let you fetch a file update if you have a copy that's been modified locally (unless you discard your changes or push them to a separate branch) so it sidesteps the entire issue right?
It doesn't make files RO as well, so you wouldn't have any issues saving to begin with.
Although Perforce/locking is the standard so I certainly agree editors should handle it properly..
@Difegue But the issue is it has not been modified locally... your still editing the file and get an error when trying to save. Nothing has changed on disk yet.
@Difegue curious; why not? I always used Git (but I don't work on binary files). This semester we have to use Perforce and it's absolute pain (where are my diffs? What files did I change? Workspace? Branches? Offline?), but I'm convinced most of that is just them not teaching the tool to us. Still, I'd much prefer something that works with my Git tooling, and I read LFS is that and has locking (?)
I have not actually used LFS in a team so I have no idea!
@jannem@grumpygamer sounds like Perforce to me. And while apps should warn you about locked files, the main culprit is Perforce. It's 2025, maybe these days there is an option somewhere to open a file for edit without trashing your (accidental) changes? That'd be nice
@grumpygamer@jannem regardless of the merging issue, this behavior just sucks when content is ok to edit and the artist just forgets to check out / open for edit (If I had a dollar for every time...) That's where a good asset management pipeline/GUI comes handy
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