So now, you and a couple friends wish to use a source control to work on a project together, but, github doesn’t work, perforce isn’t free enough, and that subversion thing is confusing! whatever will you do? well, you could use dropbox.
Now I hear you ask, “Now how in the high hickory heck do I do that?!” Well, read the steps below and find out!
>first, get drop box, you will need to get drop box desktop
>create a project, and upload it to the drop box,
>now this is important, Launch unreal engine, not the project!! and then click the browse button in the bottom left
>now, find the unreal engine .uproject file, it usually has a blue symbol, it will be inside the dropbox, which is usually in C:\users(your computer name here)\dropbox(project name here)
>simply select the .uproject file in there, and you’re good to go! you can now launch that project through your library tab in the epic games launcher.
>you can tell which it is by hovering over the picture with your mouse, and looking at the file path
And thats it, whenever someone updates the dropbox, it should update your project too!
I tried something like this, but through Google Drive. The files became corrupted and my project had to be restored from a secondary backup that I created. I do not recommend using anything that is not specifically designed for source control as source control (i.e., Dropbox, Google Drive).
Dropbox is fine as a personal real-time backup but it has none of the other benefits of source control such as commits, organised version history, branching, merging, conflict resolution, etc. You *will *get conflicted files with Dropbox the second you share a folder or add a second computer.
Git is by *far *the best version control option available. Easier, more flexible and more stable than Perforce or SVN and much more reliable than numbered copies of folders.
Use Source Tree for simplicity as your Git frontend
Make sure Git is configured correctly and you know how to use it - that means having the right project files ignored and LFS set up
If you want to host your own server (and you should) run a Digital Ocean GitLab appliance. They take five minutes to set up. Add 100GB of block storage for $10 a month and use it for LFS. Once your .uassets and .umaps are in LFS the rest of your repo will be very small and you’ll easily fit a hundred UE repos on a single server.
I use the configuration above and I’m always encouraging developers I know to use it. It wasn’t the most easy thing to set up but I’m happy to answer questions if anyone is stuck getting through it. Even a non-server-admin type person can do it.
I can do a setup and maintenance tutorial if anyone is interested.
I am not going to start a flame, there are other discussions about pros and cons of different VCS. I am just pointing out, that stating Git is best is not a good thing. With more than 5 years of experience I can say that Perforce is best one and Git is hell. It’s always about preferred workflow
That thread looks so far out of date that it’s irrelevant.
Last month one of my colleagues lost three months of work to a poorly designed Perforce gotcha. It’s a bit idealistic to say that Git is hell and Perforce is the best when what I suspect is actually the case with that conclusion is just lack of knowledge about both systems. Git is better point by point and all-round and Perforce is just a simpler, less good system. But any version control is better than none (until you lose your Perforce repo keys haha).
Edit: the more I read of that thread you linked the more “a little knowledge is more dangerous than none at all” starts to apply. That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about:
If you’re doing per-file commits with file locking you might as well all use a Dropbox share. Anyone who says the above has exactly zero experience with Git or large teams.
Git is designed to be robust and easy to use while elegantly merging entire branches of code together at-will. There isn’t a single feature in Perforce that Git doesn’t have covered, including file-locking. It’s free and it’s used by the best software developers in the industry (which might be why Epic don’t use it internally )
Been using Dropbox for 4 years on a Unreal project with a team with pretty much 0 problems. It works great. I revert files all the time. I’v’e messed up my project and was able to fix it via dropbox’s tools.
So I highly recommenced if you are not a large studio, Dropbox works great. I also use perforce at work and it’s a huge pain in the ■■■. Yes it has cool features but we barley use them. Perforce is great if you have a developer who wants to control ALL assets coming into the project.
Every time this comes up I remember the questions I asked myself that got me the hell away from working out of Dropbox:
Why did a file change? Who changed it and why?
Why did a file I was working on change back? Where did my work go?
Why am I paying per TB, per user? Alternately, why am I paying a small fortune for a business account?
Why am I not just using a self-hosted version control system such as GitLab?
Why aren’t I using the best tool for the job for each individual use case, e.g. version control for code or blueprints, asset repository for assets.
I still want *some *form of cloud backups, so I switched that part to Arq5. Again, it’s self-hosted. Some of my stuff goes into glacier because I’m unlikely to ever need to get it back out, and some of my stuff goes into S3 because I’m constantly working on it.
Dropbox is for mom and pop to back up their photos with. It’s for jerks in suits who want to seem techno-savvy but can’t actually manage it, who want to turn the people below them into an IT production line that they don’t have to talk to. It’s for developers who didn’t take the time to put together a better team system.
Edit: I see this was a necroed thread and I already replied last time. Oh well, enjoy another reply.
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