There was a big change regarding UIDs in Godot 4.4.

You should have seen a warning popup about this when you first updated your project to 4.4. You would have been given the option to convert all files to the new UID format.

As far as I understand, this should have been done by one developer as the only change. An “upgrade to Godot 4.4” commit if you will. Then all other devs should have pulled that, then continued work.

Ideally this would be done on a branch to test the effect on the project. Engine updates should never be taken lightly during a project. This applies to any game engine.

I do not like the UID system either, I’d rather fix broken refs myself, than take this mess of a system that pollutes git history.

There is a open proposal to disable the system alltogether, with a fair number of likes, but it seems that the team is not currently convinced to support disabling UIDs in the engine. There is a open PR implementing it, but it is old and I’m not sure if that approach would still work if rebased to current master.

There is also another PR for only disabling generation of separate UID files, but again, no support from the godot team.

If there is no other solution, it might be necessary to maintain a patch which would allow to build godot without UID support, but it would take effort.

Are you committing the import .import files? These contain the import settings for assets, as well as the uids the engine assigned to them.

It seems that there is no logic to it, and it leads to a lot of time lost, sometimes file corruption.

I don’t have very much practical experience with Godot, but the jam project I did with a friend uid generating was never random. From what I remember, when changes or conflicts occurred, I was always able to understand why they occurred.

What do you mean by file corruption? On the text files? You mean unfeasible to resolve conflicts or actually corrupted - as in unreadable? I don’t see how the latter would be possible with Git.

Speaking more from my software dev background than actual Godot experience; Making sure to committing and pushing generated scenes and uids or any changes really early and often should mitigate conflicts. Of course that’s only a mitigation, not understanding or resolution though.

The uids’ re-generation might be faulty, as they’re new to 4.4.

In theory the problem can still arise without using uids - it certainly has for me in the past, working on a godot 4.2 project on 2 separate machines. Godot imported the same things twice, once independently on each machine, and so generated different ids for them. From what I can tell the biggest error/mistake on my part was opening the project in the godot editor before pulling the newest commits.

The best approach I’ve found so far has been to be very conscious about when a new scene is created, and to similarly be very mindful when merging git branches.

If a scene was added, but not its .uid file (or a resource but not its .uid or .import) then whoever pulls the code and then opens their 4.4 editor will generate new uids on their end. This generation probably updates the scattered .tscn files that participate in and/or use the newly added scene.

Sadly I don’t have an exact method or workflow to recommend beyond trying to do git pulls/fetches before opening the editor, especially when new scenes, nodes, or resources have been added to the project.

I found this Reddit thread that seems to explain the cache and why the UID changes. The solution seems finnicky though. Just rebuild until they are synced? Thats gotta be complicated with multiple people.

Edit: reading that thread. It looks like this is new with the UIDs and the Godot team is still working it out. Seems really bad tbh. This might make me switch back to Godot 3.x of some kind for my development.