Thread by @delaneykingrox

Version control for #gamedev is a serious problem you have to get on top of early as an indy.

At one studio, the artists were just sending each other files via chat. They had no source control for maya files, psds or any source assets. Their concept art was on usbs.

A second issue is that artists and programmers work totally differently with their data.

Files fall into two types- you have your text based stuff (ascii) and your data stuff (binary).

A script would be text based, a photoshop or Blender file would be a binary file.

Now when two programmers work on the same text file, you want to merge their work.

But artists pretty much never want to merge their text files.

Artist text files are things like shader code or level scenes. Merging these is going to explode shit badly.

This is a fundamental problem that causes a lot of pain. A LOT of pain.

Artists, therefore work better with timestamp based systems.

Adele changed the tree at 1pm.
Billy changed the tree at 2pm.
Adele changed the tree back at 2.15pm with a stern message to leave her shit alone

This issue is solved using check out and check in based systems. Basically, Adele checks out the tree from the library. Billy tries to edit the tree, but the system says fuck no Billy, that shit belongs to Adele right now. Go ask her.

This stops overwriting binary files.

Programmers, however, want to fuck off into their own head space and work on their own stuff for a while, (called a branch or fork) and then when they are happy they try to merge their shit into the main project.

Someone checks over any conflicts and everyone prays.

Artists cannot do that. If you do, you cannot merge, you get overwriting.

Artists need to collab fast. I can make an asset and plug it in, and that can mean a tweak needs to be made to something else- and that artist can tweak that and it goes back to the lighting artist...

...thus the artists require their repository to be completely current. If we branch off, then those components aren't working with the other artists conditions. We need to be in synch.

Coders don't like that.

Thus you get a split in the way repos work. It can be a nightmare.

As an artist you need two repositories. One for the game itself, and one the source files... your maya files, zbrush files, substance files and so forth.

That second repo is going to be FUCKING MASSIVE.

Holy shit.

So that brings up another issue. That second repo is so big, you don't want to clone the whole thing and bring it all down all the time. Therefore something like GIT is just bang out, even with the LFS bolted on.

You need something that can selectively pull down files.

Okay, so that means you have several repositories, several systems, some locked files and others doing merging. People are bottlenecks to reviewing and approving merges.

The less painful you make fixing this, the better.

In short, don't use a 'diff' and merge based system for artists, such as GIT.
Use a timestamp based system with a check in/check out file lock (ensuring everyone has the option to break the lock when someone is away/ill/asleep) for artists.

Tortoise SVN, perforce etc

Don't use fork systems for art, animation or levels.

Be extremely careful with merges for things like shaders and scenes.

And invest money in a good solution because otherwise you will lose thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars in lost work.

X

Also, you can export some binary files to ascii to help fix issues... maya files can be saved as either binary (default) or ascii.

The latter allows you to find corruptions such as broken links repeating over and over to bloat your file (this saved my ass on god of war)

So you cannot just assume a merge is needed based on if it is text or binary.

Personally, I hate GIT from the very bottom of my soul. It has caused so much damage to all the projects I have had the misfortune of working on that used it.

I am at the point if a studio insists on using GIT for the art team, I will just move to another art team.

Perforce and tortoise SVN have been the best ones for the art team in my studios, and I have never been on an Alien Brain team, so cannot comment on that.