Epic Games launches Lore: open source version control for massive projects

Epic Games has introduced Lore, an open source version control system engineered for massive scalability of both data and teams. Unlike Git, which struggles with large binary assets, Lore is built from the ground up for projects like game development that combine code with gigabytes of textures, models, and audio. Its architecture is centralized and content-addressed: repository state is represented as Merkle trees, and revisions form an immutable chain where each revision's hash includes parent hashes and data hashes. Files are stored as reusable chunks with indexed lookup, reducing duplication and enabling efficient updates and transfer. Workspaces stay lightweight by fetching data on demand, avoiding upfront downloads. Branches are lightweight mutable references, so switching is instantaneous without data duplication. The system also includes a service-backed caching layer to scale throughput for large teams.

Lore is fully open source under the MIT license, hosted on Epic's GitHub. It provides a CLI with full functionality, plus SDKs in C/C++, C#, Rust, Go, Python, and JavaScript for extensibility and integration. Epic emphasizes that Lore is designed for easy local setup (minutes) and on-demand scaling. It includes tamper-evident history, free branching, and fast synchronization. Lore is already used internally at Epic for projects like Unreal Engine development. The company states it's not yet production-ready for all scenarios but welcomes community contributions to build “the version control system of the future.” Roadmap details are pending, but the MIT license ensures it will remain open.