Does your team/company store art and asset blobs (even rendered FMVs?) in Perforce too, or do you have a separate asset-management system for that? If you do have two separate systems, how do you keep the asset-store and source-control in-sync?
It's been a long time (easily 20 years now) since I dabbled in any high-end creative software (like 3ds, etc), but I remember they generally all had large binary singleton project files (like Flash .fla and Photoshop .psd files) that couldn't be deconstructed and effectively diffed by any source-control system (though Flash eventually supported external ActionScript source-files), I'm curious how that affects your org's asset storage needs.
We ... commit them. Probably some really exceptional cases stay behind some "ftp"-like service (not really ftp, something like this).
It maybe wasteful, but it's the established practice (it seems). People coming from other game companies pretty much use it too (some rare exceptions). Also the automotive/chip design industry uses them - and yes mainly for the big blobby non-diffable/mergeable assets.
Locks are terrible, and yet you gotta doit sometimes, as how else would you prevent people working on the same asset.
I'm (still) terrible with git, often screw up commits, and have to google search/stack overflow to get it right (I use it mainly for simple home projects). I can only imagine the pain and suffering a non-tech person would have with git. Also the metadata is quite lot for WFH conditions. Working remotely does not always mean working from a dumb terminal (I wish).
> Locks are terrible, and yet you gotta doit sometimes, as how else would you prevent people working on the same asset.
I'm unfamiliar with P4's locking semantics; when files are "locked" does that prohibit other users from even getting a copy of the centralized file, or merely prevent users from overwriting the centralized file on push/upload? How does branching work?
If I were designing a centralized asset management system then I'd definitely add support for git-style (i.e. "many-worlds") branches instead of SVN/TFS-style "spatial" branches - but I'd also add support for some kind of "mini-branch" or deferred-conflict-resolution, whereby a file, or entire directory, can still be pushed to central storage but have multiple different representations that can be resolved/merged later, rather than immediately. So if two artists are working on the same "texture123.psd" file without realizing it then the system would let them both push (so the first artist to push would get to overwrite the file, and the second artist's push would see their file saved as "texture123.psd.v2").
There are good business reasons for having the ability to disallow changes to files in central storage, but that doesn't mean locks need to be used: it could be done by instead directing all updates/pushes to separate mini-branches, thus allowing users to push-and-forget and allowing them to defer conflict resolution while still protecting files from unwanted changes.
I've only ever used Perforce through a command-line interface. What's the UX like when using Perforce for blobs/assets? Does everyone have to use the command-line or is there a GUI experience (with fast-rendering thumbnails?)?
Forgive the questions, I'm just curious about the minutia and peculiarities of the gaming-biz because I've never worked in the field.
Does your team/company store art and asset blobs (even rendered FMVs?) in Perforce too, or do you have a separate asset-management system for that? If you do have two separate systems, how do you keep the asset-store and source-control in-sync?
It's been a long time (easily 20 years now) since I dabbled in any high-end creative software (like 3ds, etc), but I remember they generally all had large binary singleton project files (like Flash .fla and Photoshop .psd files) that couldn't be deconstructed and effectively diffed by any source-control system (though Flash eventually supported external ActionScript source-files), I'm curious how that affects your org's asset storage needs.