wtf is lore?

Lore is an open source version control system built by Epic Games, designed specifically for projects that mix code with large binary assets, think game development, film production, and similar creative workflows. If you've ever tried managing gigabytes of textures, 3D models, or audio files alongside source code, you know that traditional tools like Git struggle badly. That's the problem this project aims to solve. At a high level, it works as a centralized system where all your project files live on a server that your team syncs to and from. Instead of downloading the entire repository history or every asset up front, it only pulls what you actually need when you need it, so your local workspace stays lightweight. Files are broken into reusable chunks, meaning if two branches share most of the same large files, the system doesn't duplicate them. Branches are cheap to create and switch between, which encourages experimentation. It also keeps a tamper-evident history, so you can trust that revisions haven't been silently altered. The primary audience is game studios and entertainment companies where artists and developers need to collaborate on massive projects. For example, a team building a game in Unreal Engine or a studio producing animated content would use this to manage everything from source code to high-resolution character models. It's already the built-in version control for Unreal Editor for Fortnite, though the open source version and that internal build aren't fully interoperable yet due to a compression format mismatch Epic is actively resolving. The project is written in Rust and provides SDKs for several languages, JavaScript, Python, C#, Go, and C/C++, so teams can integrate it into existing pipelines. It's still pre-1.0, so interfaces and file formats may change between releases. That said, it's fully open source under MIT license, and Epic is actively developing it with a public roadmap.