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Unreal Engine editor plugin for analyzing asset dependency impact and change risk.

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Asset Impact Analyzer

Asset Impact Analyzer is an Unreal Engine editor plugin that helps understand the impact and risk of asset changes.

It analyzes asset dependencies and referencers, builds a dependency graph, and estimates how widely a change to a selected asset may propagate through a project.

The goal is to make asset-level change risk visible and measurable during development.


Why This Exists

In larger Unreal projects, changing a single asset can have unexpected side effects:

  • materials affecting many meshes
  • shared assets referenced across levels
  • hidden transitive dependencies

Asset Impact Analyzer makes these relationships explicit so developers can reason about change impact before making edits.


What It Does

  • Builds dependency and referencer graphs for selected assets
  • Distinguishes direct vs transitive impact
  • Computes an impact severity score based on affected asset types
  • Supports filtering (Engine, Plugins, World Partition internals)
  • Exports detailed analysis results to JSON
  • Runs entirely as an editor-only, non-intrusive plugin

How It Works

  1. Select one or more assets in the Content Browser
  2. Run Analyze Impact
  3. The plugin:
    • traverses dependency and referencer relationships
    • aggregates affected assets
    • computes an overall severity score
    • exports a structured report

Results are logged to the Output Log and saved as JSON files.


Output

For each analyzed asset, the plugin generates a report containing:

  • root asset
  • overall severity and score
  • impacted assets
  • impact grouped by asset type

Reports are written to:

(Project)/Saved/Analysis/

Example Content

Minimal example assets are included in:

Content/Examples/

Dependency chain:

Texture → Material → Skeletal Mesh → Level

These can be used to quickly verify:

  • direct vs transitive impact
  • severity scoring behavior

Installation

  1. Clone or download this repository
  2. Place the plugin in:
    (Project)/Plugins/AssetImpactAnalyzer
    
  3. Open the project in Unreal Engine
  4. Enable Asset Impact Analyzer in:
    Edit → Plugins → Tools
    
  5. Restart the editor

Requirements

  • Unreal Engine 5.x
  • Editor build (plugin is editor-only)

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Unreal Engine editor plugin for analyzing asset dependency impact and change risk.

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