This is part of a series of posts on source control for game development. Read more in the Blog.
We couldn’t reach the end of this series without talking about a source control giant, I’m talking of course about Subversion or SVN for short.
Every programmer should have heard of Subversion. Its massive popularity from the 2000s until today has only been outshined by Git fairly recently. In the games industry, SVN remains a very popular choice due to being free and implementing the file-based source control model which maps so well to our needs, as outlined in the previous articles. While not a common choice in larger studios, smaller ones and indie teams have long been using SVN as their backbone and for good reason.
Personally, I haven’t used SVN since my early programming days, and never in my professional career. This article was a good opportunity to get familiar with it again and see how it competes against the other solutions we have studied so far.
So, is SVN a good source control solution for game development? Let’s dig in!