The Asset System aims to unify file management across the range of tools present in CRYENGINE. For this purpose we have decided to break down the content of CRYENGINE projects into assets, and organize our workflow around them.
Assets are the "unit of work" of a CRYENGINE project and represent one or several files on disk, as well as a *.cryasset metadata file to carry extra information relevant to this asset. Note that only one person should be working on a specific asset at a given time and all files related to an asset must be checked in and out of source control simultaneously.
The goal of this system is to hide the files from the Designers and have them reason about assets only - this should be a much more simple and intuitive representation of their work.
Using the tools available in the Sandbox Editor, Designers can then import, create, edit and submit assets to the main repository of the project.
The main tool and the front-end for the Asset System is the Asset Browser. See here for information on how this works.
The Asset System needs to store metadata for every asset. To achieve this, every asset comes with a *.cryasset file that contains all the relevant information for the asset.
Before being able to use the Asset Browser on an existing project you'll have to generate *.cryasset files.
Any project created using Engine version 5.2 or earlier doesn't have the metadata required, so if your project was created using one of those Engine versions you'll have to follow this procedure.
This procedure is unnecessary if your project was created with Engine version 5.3 or later, as metadata will automatically be created for assets made in Engine versions 5.3 and later.
In the Asset Browser, choose Edit -> Generate/Repair All Metadata.
Your assets should now be displayed in the Asset Browser.
If the cryasset files are missing, something is corrupted or if some assets do not show in the content browser, then you can either re-import/re-save individual assets or use the repair button mentioned above.