Conflicts are starting to become an issue :/

[TaylorAnderson]

I was only able to merge about half of the PR's that were up this morning, because merging some PRs inevitably introduced conflicts in others. How do we want to deal with this? It seems like this is going to be an inevitable problem, and it's especially challenging because a lot of them occur in tscn files, which are tough to read/edit without breaking the game.

[casssoft]

One way is to merge PRs in the order they arrived and skip the ones that have conflicts. Then ask people to fix their own merge conflicts.
Maybe make a bot or something that can automatically ask people nicely to fix their conflicts.

[harrisongowland]

While I agree at this scale, if more people enter and start working on it and trying to issue pull requests, its going to get difficult to keep on top of it very quickly.

If we want to prevent multiple people editing a .tscn file at the same time, IMO there would need to be some kind of regimented system to prevent more than one person from being allowed to use it at once - a spreadsheet of who has what scene locked, for instance, and then PRs for scenes someone doesn't have access to can be deprioritised in favour of the opposite. Then maybe:

• A number of blank .tscn files get generated (20, say) and they get passed out first come, first served, so that people working in indvidual scenes don't risk clashing with each other (which itself comes with the drawback that people outside of that first 20 are sort of locked out), or;
• There's a spreadsheet with a list of the existing scenes, and when someone wants to make a new level they add a line to it with the number of the level they want to make. Once they do that and add their username to the row, that level number is reserved to them and only they can make changes to it until they PR it out or unlock it otherwise

Idk how one would fix people wanting to make changes to the .tscn file bcs admittedly i'm not that familiar with the godot workflow, but if it has some sort of "import scene additively at runtime" function people can maybe build systems in their own scenes and then call them in if they want to add new game mechanics? idk lol

[vegeta897]

Solution: Only allow new scenes to be created, and amass so many that we can use them for machine-learning to generate the levels that are actually played in the game.

Half-joking. Maybe we can consider changing the linear nature of levels to something better suited for a game with user-contributed levels?

[aeonofdiscord]

One other option is to mark .tscn files as binary using .gitattributes or whatever, so git just doesn't try to merge them automatically. This doesn't reduce the overall number of conflicts that need resolving but it does at least mean that nobody's scene files get messed up.