This is the whole idea in forty seconds, with nothing sped up to make it look faster than it is.
If you would rather read it, the same four moments are written out below, because the interesting part of each one is what happens that the video cannot show you.
#What happens in it
- A pack arrives whole. A zip is dropped in, and what comes out the other side is the pack as its author assembled it: readme, license file, folder structure and all. Nothing is flattened into a heap of loose files.
- One pack waits to be answered. Tessera could not establish the license for it, so it sits in Review rather than joining the library on a guess. One answer settles it for every file in it, forever.
- A search runs across every archive. Not across file names, and not across the packs that happen to be unzipped. Everything, including the insides of archives that were never unpacked.
- A game gets its files, and its credits. Assets are copied into the project in the format
that engine prefers, and a
CREDITS.mdis written and kept current from the record, without anybody opening a text file at the end of the project to try to remember.
#The part the video cannot show
A demo can only show you the happy path, so here is the rest of it.
Nothing is copied that you did not ask for. Assets are only ever copied into a game, never moved. The library keeps the pack whole, because that is what makes the record mean anything later.
It works on an existing mess. Nothing in the video starts from an empty disk in real life. If your assets are already on a drive and your project already references them, Tessera can read the folders where they are and recognize what the project already has, rather than asking you to migrate. That is the whole of another post.
There is no account and no server. The library is an ordinary folder of ordinary files on your own disk. Delete Tessera tomorrow and everything you put in it is still there, still readable, still organized the way its authors organized it.
#Where to go next
Install it, or read getting started first. It is free and open source, and it runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.