We are currently using Tortoise SVN and were wondering if Perforce is any different.
I’m thinking of setting up a version control as well, and I have some questions.
First: I remember when I set up Tortoise SVN some years ago for another project, it created thousands and thousands of files on the local disk, which I did not like. Does SVN for Rocket also does this?
Second: Perforce is paid, right? There is no free version?
Hi Jefferson,
The questions you are asking are about how Perforce and SVN work fundamentally and are not about rocket. I would encourage you to check google, its a great resource for questions like that.
Cheers!
Also worth nothing, that Perforce and Epic have been collaborating on how to get Perforce into the hands of indies.
http://www.perforce.com/company/newsletter/2012/02/perforce-now-free-20-users
In our project we use SVN, but Epic uses perforce becouse its a LOT better while dealing with binary files such as textures or 3d assets. SVN or GIT are awful for binary files, as they were designed for code, wich is text files. When a binary file is uploaded to the SVN, it creates a complete copy. Perforce, instead, just saves the difference, wich can save a LOT of space. Perforce also is better in very big repositories and a bit better for production.
But i prefer to use SVN becouse its just so much simpler, perforce only gave headaches to me when i tried to use it…
On the internet you can find a lot of information about both SVN and Perforce, and how they differ from each other (perforce vs svn - Google Search).
At Epic we use Perforce as our version control system, which is why we first implemented Perforce support in Rocket. However, we designed our version control API in a way that also supports other systems through plug-ins. In the upcoming Rocket Beta 5 we have experimental support for SVN.
Using our Perforce and SVN plug-ins as an example, you will also be able to implement support for other SCC providers, if desired.
Also, see Paul’s answer above with regard to free P4 licenses.
How can we get our hands on the plugin source for SVN and Perforce? I’ve only located the binaries so far.
Hey Tom,
None of the source code for the current Rocket plug-in has been released yet. We are having internal discussions about which plug-ins to release source code for and how to do that, but nothing has been decided yet, and there is no release date right now.
We did ship the public header files that declare the interfaces for source control providers. You can find those in /Engine/Source/Developer/SourceControl. If you look at the code documentation for those you can get a pretty good idea of what needs to be done to implement your own provider. If you have any specific problems or questions, we can probably help you out.
I think Perforce is much easier to use when you are trying to revert to older versions of files, it has tools that you can look at the history of a file and scroll through it’s checkin timeline seeing the code changes side by side.
There is a Visual Studio Plugin which makes using it much simpler. Unlike SVN, you need to checkout a file to change it which is annoying if you are just using the P4Win as you have to find each file and check it out, if you have the Visual Studio plugin installed you just start typing in the file and the plugin will check it out for you.
For hosting the server, I use Digital Ocean and have a virtual Ubuntu 64bit machine with a 2 core proc and 20 gig ssd, it’s $5 a month.