Changelists and per-file versioning modelĮach change in Perforce is grouped together into a Changelist. Unfortunately, not many people know or use DVCS, so let’s hope this article gets the word out. This works in command-line in a similar way to Git and has recently been added to the P4V client. However, Perforce does, in fact, have a decentralized option called DVCS. I will agree that it is mostly a workaround, and feels lackluster after using Git for a while. The most basic tool is shelving which is the equivalent of Git stashes. Perforce is often criticized for a lack of decentralized workflow, even though it provides several tools for it. This is great for programmers working on several features at the same time, amongst other things. The only really interesting part of the distributed workflow is evident for programmers: the ability to create commits and branches which are only on your local machine and are not shared with everyone. Where open source leverages the distributed model to make up for a lack of trust, game development projects are most likely comprised of people trusting each other to work in a central repository. Everyone needs to collaborate on the same project and be allowed to change it and receive updates as fast as possible. Game development is at its core a centralized effort. Perforce is packed full of features and I’m still discovering some of them. Some are migrating away after massive engineering efforts, others like the game industry are sticking with it. Perforce has a history of being successfully used on large projects and by reputable companies. This shows how much effort was necessary to adapt Git to handle as much as Perforce could. This was used notably for the Windows repository, which has now been migrated to Git, but they could only achieve this incredible feat after creating VFS for Git (previously called GVFS). Microsoft famously maintains (or maintained?) a fork of Perforce called Source Depot. EA, Ubisoft, Epic, Capcom, Crytek, CD Projekt Red just to name a few. On their officially disclosed list of customers, you can find Perforce is used by major game studios. In fact, I do not know of any sizeable studio not using Perforce. While this claim is hard to verify, in my experience this is true when it comes to medium to large teams. They also claim that 19 out of 20 game development studios are using Perforce. These days the official branding for the source control product is “Helix Core”, but in my heart and for this article, we will still refer to it as Perforce.Īs stated on the official website, Perforce focuses on security, managing binary artifacts, performance at scale and teams distributed globally. Later, the company was bought and more products were added over the years to compliment the source control. I still remember its slogan being “the fast source control”. Perforce went through a few branding (mis)adventures as the years went by. The goal was to provide a system allowing companies to keep track of changes in large projects containing both source code and binary files. This time, let’s examine why is Perforce so popular.Īccording to wikipedia, Perforce (the company) was started in 1995 with its first product being the eponymous Perforce (the source control solution). In the previous article, I explained why Git is not the most optimal source control solution for game development. 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. I have personally used Perforce in every single one of my professional projects. 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. Perforce is the most widely used source control solution for game development studios.Īt 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. This is part of a series of posts on source control for game development.
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