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05
May
2020
Best Source Control for game development: The Verdict

Best Source Control for game development: The Verdict

This is part of a series of posts on source control for game development. Read more in the Blog.

We have finally reached the end of this series trying to find the best source control for game development.

If you have followed through all of the articles, the answer to your questions may still be unclear. Each solution has its pros and cons, many different pricing and hosting options. If you're a small team or an indie developer, you do not know what the future holds. Perhaps you'll sign a big publishing deal and need to scale rapidly with a larger budget, in which case your choices are changed once again.

So, for the final article in this series, and perhaps the only one you should read, I'll try to provide an overview of our findings and provide simple guidelines to help you with your choice.

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Posted by Samuel Kahn in Source Control, Source Control Comparison
29
Apr
2020
Subversion Source Control for game development

Subversion Source Control for game development

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!

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Posted by Samuel Kahn in Source Control, Source Control Comparison
19
Feb
2020
Plastic SCM Source Control for game development

Plastic SCM Source Control for game development

This is part of a series of posts on source control for game development. Read more in the Blog.

Plastic SCM is a lesser-known source control solution for game development. In fact, I expect that a lot of the readers will be hearing about it for the first time. I personally discovered it only a few years ago. So why is it worth an article in this series?

Well, Plastic SCM promises a lot: Plastic SCM brands itself as “the version control for games”, and promises to deliver all the benefits of Git, as well as all the speed and power of Perforce, enterprise-grade features and support, unparalleled user experience, and unique features on top of that!

In fact, I was so excited by the product that I decided to evaluate it when I started Darewise, and back then I was very impressed. So let’s jump right in and see how it looks like today!

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Posted by Samuel Kahn in Source Control, Source Control Comparison
26
Nov
2019
Perforce Source Control for game development

Perforce Source Control for game development

This is part of a series of posts on source control for game development. Read more in the Blog.

Perforce is the most widely used source control solution for game development studios.

At Darewise, we evaluated many options and finally opted for Perforce, much like the rest of the game industry, or at least those who can afford it. Pretty much all major AAA studios, and medium to large teams are using Perforce as their main source control, so there must be some valid reasons behind this choice. I have personally used Perforce in every single one of my professional projects. I have worked primarily with workflow issues and source control, so this is a product I know very well and I might be slightly biased towards it.

In the previous article, I explained why Git is not the most optimal source control solution for game development. This time, let’s examine why is Perforce so popular.

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Posted by Samuel Kahn in Source Control, Source Control Comparison
05
Nov
2019
Git Source Control for game development

Git Source Control for game development

This is part of a series of posts on source control for game development. Read more in the Blog.

Git is probably the first result people stumble onto when researching source control for their game development project.

As evidenced by my activity on this very website, I am very interested in Git. I have used it extensively both professionally as well as for personal projects including game projects. I have come to love its beautiful design, and hate its limitations. Because of those, I created GitCentral to overcome Git’s shortcomings and create a better-suited source control workflow for game development.

This article is a good opportunity to examine the motivations behind creating GitCentral, and shed some light on why Git is both great, and difficult to use for game development.

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Posted by Samuel Kahn in Source Control, Source Control Comparison
29
Oct
2019
What is the best Source Control for game development ?

What is the best Source Control for game development ?

Choosing the best Source Control for a game development project is a hot topic in the indie community. Many teams struggle with making the right choice, and the advice available online is often misleading. The answer is surprisingly not obvious, and there is no one size fits all solution.

Earlier this year I talked at the Nordic Game Conference about Source Control, and how to structure your team’s workflow, automation and continuous integration and deployment pipeline around it. You can download the slides here. As this is one of my areas of expertise, I wanted to go deeper into the subject and break down the options available in order for game development teams to make an educated choice about source control.

In this series, we will study the major options available to you, their various pros and cons, and highlight the reasons why you should choose one over another depending on your team size, budget, and makeup.

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Posted by Samuel Kahn in Source Control, Source Control Comparison