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[TrashMan]

I know games where just placing things in the right folder is all it takes. In most other games just placing TerranCity01.jpg in the illustration folder and than calling for it in a system file would be enough. The game would look into the mod folder, then the core folder for a file with that name. Failing both it would use a default image.

But it seems you have to define every single file - image or sound - for Starsector.
It's more work with more point of failure due to typo...

[Pushover]

Having an asset manager is really a game design decision. The question is really 'how else do you solve the problem of loading all the assets?'

You need some way to load all the files before they are needed, or else you get laggy gameplay. It can save programming time in that you don't need to type out long paths.

You could dynamically load everything in the asset folders, but that leads to extra memory usage. Some discussion on it:

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1506/why-use-asset-manifest-files

At this point, it's far enough in that moving away from the system would be a lot of work.

There are other solutions, this is one that works, and like many solutions, has its pros and cons.