581–590 of 717 posts
One of the reasons I left the game industry, or at least one the benefits of leaving was to not have to use Perforce any longer. Albeit a necessary evil, hopefully lore is better. I always wondered if a combination of a database to index assets and asset versions with the data being in S3 style storage would be better for game assets; code can be in Git. Then your workflows are easy to build on top of that.
For context, since a lot of people on HN haven't worked on games - this is not intended to compete with Git for general software development. This is a competitor with Perforce for game development. Git is fine for text based files like code, but it's really bad at stuff like textures, 3D models, audio files, and other non-text files that game developers need to collaborate on. For example, one artist might need to o…
For context, since a lot of people on HN haven't worked on games - this is not intended to compete with Git for general software development. This is a competitor with Perforce for game development. Git is fine for text based files like code, but it's really bad at stuff like textures, 3D models, audio files, and other non-text files that game developers need to collaborate on. For example, one artist might need to o…
Should coordination live in the VCS layer? That sounds like it creates more issues than prevents.
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I’ve started using JJ vcs, mainly because some people were saying it was great and I didn’t really get it. I’m starting to come around though. From a UI perspective it’s a major improvement on git. The branching workflow is something that has taken a bit to get used to though.
Jj is weird. In general it’s a better ui and model than git, but there’s a few common operations that are just dumb. It also recreates a lot of the stupidity of mercurial (which makes sense) The fact that everyone needs the same stupid “tug” alias because jj wants to use “bookmarks” instead of just named branches is just classic silly shit. We’ve had named branches for 40 years. Everyone who has vcs experience knows…
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I went in the other direction. 8 years at EA and now at Google working on open source. Everything is so easy when your entire source repo is a paltry few hundred megs and you can build everything from source in a few minutes. It feels like flying.
Oh, and thanks for writing Game Programming Patterns. That was a great resource.
This is a very promising announcement for Unreal game development specifically. For any other purpose I wouldn't care as much. Perforce definitely needs a challenger. It is not the incumbent because it is particularily simple to use or administer. Git is actually way simpler when it comes to branching operations for example. The reasons why p4 is often preferred in gamedev have already been mentioned in other comment…
We had to use Perforce (Helix Core Cloud) at my last game studio, and it is the de facto industry standard that most of your creative staff is already familiar with. The programmers don't love it, but they don't rule the roost in games. It's also the safe, verified default for working with Unreal Engine 5. It does show its years though. We were one of the first users of the Perforce cloud offering, as we were small a…
ditto; and UE5 on anything that isn't perforce is a lesson in pain. I just took over a team that was using Git, and yes, I know it's everyones favourite VCS but for Games it's just about the worst thing available. I could measure art reviews with git in hours, now with perforce its seconds. I wish I was joking. All the interesting tools that UE5 uses (Horde/UBA for a clean example) will require perforce. but, Perforc…
UGS (the tool that pulls down the latest engine version for artist) is pretty perforce centric.
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Something else that git isn't good at: permissions. In gamedev, you might have proprietary work that you want to restrict to certain users. In P4, you can add restrictions to certain directories for only those who have signed the required NDAs. That's not something that you can do in git: it's all or nothing. Maybe you can set something up with submodules, but that's going to upend your repository if you hadn't plann…
I once worked in a git repository that required those kinds of restrictions. This was within a bank and the code in question was related to enabling Apple Pay from within the banking application. The consequences of that information and code leaking or being seen by anyone who had not signed the NDA were very serious (don't remember the details but it made the lawyers were extremely stressed about it). Needing to fig…
We're also working on an open source large asset versioning tool called "oxen" - https://github.com/Oxen-AI/Oxen Would love any feedback on it or contributions if people are interested :)
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I’ve started using JJ vcs, mainly because some people were saying it was great and I didn’t really get it. I’m starting to come around though. From a UI perspective it’s a major improvement on git. The branching workflow is something that has taken a bit to get used to though.
Jj is weird. In general it’s a better ui and model than git, but there’s a few common operations that are just dumb. It also recreates a lot of the stupidity of mercurial (which makes sense) The fact that everyone needs the same stupid “tug” alias because jj wants to use “bookmarks” instead of just named branches is just classic silly shit. We’ve had named branches for 40 years. Everyone who has vcs experience knows…