Team work and versioning for assets and media?

Hi,

I understand Unreal already supports Perforce and SVN versioning systems, which are great for C++ and assets inside unreal, however, I’d like to know how you guys manage to synchronize with your teams (tools, workflow, etc). The programmers in our team have no trouble using versioning systems (by the way, we use git, does Unreal support it also?), however, our artists are more comfortable doing their own thing, with dropbox, for example. My questions are:

  1. What tools/workflow do you guys use to share, version and synchronize projects with your team?
  2. Does Unreal integrate also with git (is there a plugin)?
  3. Will the assets be serialized in text instead of binary when I activate source control?
  4. Giving the latest import features in 4.7, is there a simple way to update the unreal project whenever a folder in Dropbox (actually, any local folder) is updated?
  5. Is is recommended to use one policy for media assets, like textures, meshes, animations, audio, etc and source/blueprint?

Thanks in advance!

The engine supports both git and blueprint merge since 4.7. You can find a quick info on how to activate these features in the release notes: 4.7 Release notes

  • We use SVN without ever locking (checking out) files. As you are using git, our workflow is of little help to you. Anyway, we have been keeping the svn repository in Dropbox for a while since it was free :slight_smile: When we have gathered more resources, we moved it to Azure. Dropbox is convenient until you have to merge something, then it becomes nightmarish. I would refrain from using it for most assets (concept art and the like is probably fine).
  • Yes, since 4.7 (see link)
  • No, but they can be merged quite easily with Blueprint merge (see link). With SVN it works like a charm, but you might want to check how it deals with the git plugin (which is still beta but works fine most of the time).
  • You can make a hard link to any folder on your disk, even on Windows. I did link my Content folder to Dropbox and it worked fine, but I consider this an ugly hack since it lacks version control.
  • I didn’t quite get what you mean by policy, but that’s because I’m not an expert :slight_smile: We treat all our assets as a whole (Content folder is fully synced), however, you are free to set up custom ignores on every machine. I wonder why you would want that, anyway.