Karatakos said:
I perhaps have not been clear enough, but the approach I’m taking is quite common, i.e. Quake 3 state snapshots.

The approach WAS quite common in the late 90's 25 years ago, yes. It was also an era when 4 players was hard and 16 players was extreme and AAA, and a “high bandwidth” conn…

How I made my custom engine project modifiable by the players.

So, I decided I wanted my game to be modifiable from the ground up.

To make sure the mod tools worked well and were bug free, I decided it was best to use them to build the actual game.

So, when running the game, you have tools available …

You might want to go so far as to store those references and dependencies in the metadata, instead of the raw asset itself. Then you could build your entire dependency graph from the metadata alone without needing to load any asset data, and use the aforementioned database to perform all sorts of r…