OK the changes where not that difficult so I just pushed 2 changes to the code :
- You can now only mark assets without generating the preview
- You can now select which data type you want to mark as assets, in 3.0 it’s only possible to mark Objects, Actions, Worlds and Materials.
Do you think it is possible to create a prompt with the save version set as a reminder? As in let the script check what setting is used for “save version” before proceeding and to only have it proceed with ‘0’ set. When done, it should open the preferences in the save version tab so you can set it back to what it was. I think it’s best not to directly alter the preferences, as you don’t want to risk a bug getting in the script that would ruin saving when you’re not cognisant of this. Just a thought.
Yeah I need to think this through very carefully. I definitely don’t want the script to change the preferences globally, and not even temporarily since if for some reason it crashes mid way it won’t reset the value back. I could automatically detect if a new file has been generated and deleting it afterwards, but again this needs to be done carefully so as not to erase unintended files. I’ll think about it 
I don’t know how well this scales for larger files (500Mb trees), but if you could predict the timing this well, a prompt/ progress bar could be nice as an indication. I’ll be sure to let it run when I am away from my PC anyways.
Well I can predict it because I set the interval to 1.0 second in the code ! However I have quite a beefy PC so it’s possible on some lower end computers and with complex objects that the preview takes more than 1 second to generate, in which case I’ll add an option to increase the interval. It doesn’t take into account the time it takes Blender to actually open the file nor save it afterwards, though but it depends on a lot of factors so it’s impossible to predict.
Just out of curiosity, do the previews store in the .blend files within the asset library (the folder) themselves? And is that what is causing the slight size inflation? It’s really nice to have these thumbnails and files associated.
As far as I know they’re stored in the .blend file where the asset was marked, so yeah in theory you can send the library files to someone else and they’ll have the preview generated already. Didn’t test it though so I may be wrong 
Cheers