How to load a plaintext/json asset into a string

[andoco]

I'd like to load a json asset file into string for parsing by the serde library. It looks like text files aren't currently supported for loading via the AssetServer, so would I need to implement an Asset type and AssetLoader for text/json files? Or perhaps there's a better alternative approach?

[hymm]

The way to do it is a custom asset loader. There are some published package that you can use for inspiration here https://bevyengine.org/assets/#helpers. There's also an example in the bevy repo.

If you're just trying to hack something together and don't care about blocking rendering for a bit, you can also just do blocking file operations from inside of a system.

[pianosaurus]

There are plugins available for this now. The place to look is https://bevyengine.org/assets/#asset-loading, and specifically https://github.com/NiklasEi/bevy_common_assets handles json for you (as well as several other formats).