Fileformat differences? (.tres .res .scn .material etc.)

Help
1

Can someone explain me the advantages and disadvantages of the different file formats?

So far I’m only aware of:

.res is binary format

.tres is text format that can be easily read and edited

In addition to .res and .tres some (or all?) resources have their own fileformat:

Materials: .tres .material .res

Scenes: .tscn .scn .res

Should I use the corresponding fileformat for those and why/why not?
When saving a resource the default option is set to the text format.

2

Scenes: tscn
Resources: tres
[Shader] materials: material

To some degree it doesn’t matter the extension, as i think there is some contextual text that says what it is. It’s more for us humans to discern.

E.g.

A resource file

[gd_resource ... ]
...

A scene file

[gd_scene ... ]
...

You can rename the file to another format but it doesn’t change its behavior. Scenes still act like scenes and resources act like resources.

(I couldn’t find a material example)

3

I see. I believe I somewhere read that .tres is better suited for version control, is that true?

4

Yeah, text based files are great for version control, as tools like git diff (and most code editors) can easily highlight the differences in a human understandable way.

Technically you can perform the same diff on binary files, but the highlighted differences would just look like a garbled line of characters with no meaning.