Epic Games has open-sourced Lore, a new version control system built for large-scale projects that combine source code with large binary assets, such as games and entertainment production workflows.
Lore addresses issues traditional version control systems encounter with very large repositories containing many binary files. Game development projects combine source code with textures, models, audio, videos, and other large assets.
These files differ from plain text source code, which is prevalent in traditional Git repositories, making efficient storage, syncing, and branching increasingly difficult as teams and repositories scale.
Epic’s solution is a centralized, content-addressed version control system. Lore stores repository data by content hash and represents repository state using Merkle trees and an immutable revision chain. This enables data reuse across history and branches, while providing integrity checks and a verifiable source of truth.
The system uses chunked storage for large files, allowing them to be split into reusable pieces rather than duplicating entire files with each change, thereby reducing storage demands and improving transfer efficiency when working with large binary assets.
Another key feature is on-demand hydration and sparse workspaces. Rather than requiring users to download every file in a repository upfront, Lore fetches file data only when needed.
Lore supports lightweight branches and fast switching, implementing branches as mutable references instead of full data copies. The system offers full functionality through a command-line interface and provides APIs for integration with C/C++, C#, Rust, Go, Python, and JavaScript.
Lore is already integrated as the built-in version control system for UEFN, the Unreal Editor for Fortnite. However, the open-source tooling cannot currently communicate with the UEFN version because UEFN uses a proprietary compression format that Epic says cannot be included in the open-source release.
Epic is working to transition UEFN to the same open compression format used by the open-source Lore project, which should eventually close this gap. Until then, Lore’s public release and the UEFN implementation remain separate.
The Linux setup uses a shell installer to start Lore in demo mode, letting users create a local server and test the system without a full production deployment.
Finally, keep in mind that Lore remains an early-stage project with a specific target audience: teams managing massive repositories, large assets, and workflows where Git may not be enough. For standard source code projects, Git remains the default choice.
The project is available on GitHub under the MIT license. Written primarily in Rust, Lore is currently at version 0.8.3, indicating it is an early, pre-1.0 release and not yet a production-ready replacement for existing systems.
