Currently I dont have created anything valuable enough to be worth protecting much. Im still in the learning phase.
Diskspace is not really an for me (Currently I have 7,5TB free).
My projects go on a external harddrive.
If I reach the point where losing my work would mean losing money, job or both, then i would, take addtional steps.
For example storing the data on USB sticks (one stick per project/batch of work) and store these in a fireproof vault.
However I would never, never ever, store any of my data online. Call me old fashioned, but I like to remain of my data…
(The little application I had in mind would track filestamps and only backup new files and keep an overview in what backup generation each file appears).
Currently been using symbolic links and Google Drive to keep my project saved in a cloud storage. Only problem, though, is that it automatically synchronizes and overwrites previous files.
We’re currently just 2 guys working on a test project for our Rifts, and I’d like to find a better way to dynamically keep both our projects up to date*(and backups?)*. What would you guys recommend?
Always source control, although given the nature of how beneficial IDE integration is, I’m starting to wonder if perforce or SVN aren’t better options.
I installed perforce on my linux box today. It’s not quite working yet but when I get it going I’ll come back and comment on it.
As far as it goes, if you have nothing, use git. It’s still pretty darn good even without IDE integration.
Aw man, I was working on some stuff and had a lot of nodes connected from one variable, and they all went away for some reason. Luckily my buddy in another city wanted to pull my game and try it out, so I had uploaded it already!
Yeah admittedly, I need to come to grips with Git too.
At work, we use TFS (Team Foundation Server), and I guess I could install the “lite” version at home.
But for most of my personal software development, game and graphics assets, I have been using File Hamster Advanced](://www.filehamster/index.php?page=products) - it’s easy to setup and it keeps a configurable number of backups of your asset files.
I had a situation occur the other night that would require something far greater than a double facepalm. Basically, UE4 doesn’t like it whenever a project is outside of the root folder and won’t generate new target files, so you can’t compile code. I was trying to fix so we could move to the 4.4 build and… the entire game got deleted. I felt like I was about to vomit, cry and then pass out. I called my partner and said, “Dude… I ****ed up so bad. I deleted the entire game,” and he says, “It’s cool man, Dropbox keeps previous saves of our build.” So in the end everything got restored, but it was one of the worst moments of my life.
Well the ideal in a small team is to keep things as simple as possible by breaking things up in a way that best fits the needs.
If you are working local then simply backing up stuff and protecting your own works will work so if something goes boom you can always rebuild the framework. Personally I use Norton Ghost saved to a network cloud server so its all off of the local drive space in case of a HD crash.
Working remote becomes a bit tricky as what will work for a team of say 400 is not really necessary and at times the complexity of the such a setup will create it’s own problems above and beyond the solution. Someone lock out changes half way around the world you have a problem.
What works for us is a two part system. Delivery via SVN and version control using Araxis Merge.
SVN does not have version control built in but if the build goes boom it’s easy to revert to the last know working build and since a SVN has to be mirrored to each client there is always a backup.
The next set up is to use a two folder system where you have the SVN as the update and commit folder and another folder as the work in progress as to the needs of the individuals on the team. Araxis Merge comes into play when there is a need to send from your working build over to the SVN folder and to compare one file that needs updating and another that would normally be a dependency that does not need to be updated.
It’s a manual process but being a small team it’s just a matter of creating some simple rules of what to do and what not to do. The one thing not to do is to use a migrate from your working build to the SVN as it would be very easy to break it overwriting dependencies.
As soon as you have more than one developer you should move to source control. Just being able to merge commits from two different developers cleanly will make it worth it.
It’s a bit of a learning bump but my god it’s good. And I have to say, being able to diff inside UE made my life much easier last night.
If you want to be a much more effective developer, source control is the way to go. And git is definitely the source control you want to use now that there’s some UE support.
As a solo developer I’ve used Git before for scripting in other engines / languages. The benefits then are immediately apparent, being able to see changes, rolling back commits, merging branches etc… on a file or even line-by-line basis.
But with blueprints the benefits are not so obvious. Due to the file structure and what not I can’t see the point over strictly keeping back-ups, I’d love for the integrated source control to include Git as I have yet to touch SVN / Perforce (costs money right?) but I will if it’s highly recommended as my project progresses.
Until then I can’t see basic source control giving me any benefits that back-up’s can not. Unless anyone can enlighten me? (PS, talking strictly blueprints here, I understand how obviously beneficial it would be for anyone working with with the source code.)
Perforce looks free but I had trouble setting it up. In the end I couldn’t connect to it.
I’d give the UE integration plugin for git a go above. It uses a much smaller subset of the git commands (I’m going to keep using commandline for commits and pushes) but it has diffing between blueprints and version history. It’s object-aware, so whether it’s a model or a blueprint or whatever, you can see the old version.
Not sure how it handles deltas but I’ve already turned those off for uassets and umaps.
