#Perforce

[technicjelle]

Infrastructure for Teamwork, a.k.a. Version Control

Working together on a game is quite difficult. How do you make sure everyone is on the same page?

You could send zips with assets and code between people, but that is slow, cumbersome, and very error-prone.

This is why Source Control software was invented. With Source Control, you can store the project files on a server, and everyone who wants to work on the project files, can download the project from the server. Once they're done with their changes, they send them back to the server. Then the other people can get those changes from the server again.

There are many different Source Control softwares. Probably the best-known one is git. (Source Control, Version Control, Revision Control all mean essentially the same thing.) Git is very good for working on projects that are all just plain-text code. However, it kind of falls flat when it needs to deal with binary assets, like textures, models, and sounds. Unreal Engine Scenes and Blueprints are also binary files. So if you don't use C++, but only Blueprints, basically your entire project is binary files.

This is why I went looking for a different Version Control Software that can handle this better. At my internship, I used Subversion, which is said to work better with binary assets, but in my experience then, it still wasn't exactly great. Though that might also have been due to the fact that they barely used any of its fancier features there.

Unreal Engine itself recommends using Perforce Helix Core. (Perforce is the company, Helix Core is the VCS, but the term "Perforce" is usually used to refer to the VCS itself, due to historical reasons. Source) So I looked into it, and indeed, it seemed very suitable!

So we requested a computer from the XR Lab to use as server for this project, and I installed the Helix Core Server on it.

It was surprisingly easy to install!

I then downloaded the Helix Core Client application on my laptop, and connected to the server. The setup there took a while, because there was a lot to learn. But in the end, I did it!

Sadly, Perforce is not free, so we are forced to use the free version, which is limited to a maximum of five users. We are with ten people, so we had to choose a few "representatives" who would actually put the things everyone made into the project. We requested an educational licence from Saxion, but got told to wait. Now that the project is over, we still don't have it. We also requested an educational licence from Perforce itself, directly, but we have still not got a response. But we made do with the limitations we got.

I wrote a guide for my teammates on how to set up a workspace for the project with Perforce, and improved it multiple times based on user testing and feedback. (I sat next to my teammates while they were following the guide and tried my best to now say anything; to let the guide speak for itself. I would then take note of what went wrong and improved that section of the guide for the next user test.)

Over the months of this project, we all used P4V and Perforce to work together on the project. Due to Perforce's locking system, we never had any merge conflicts! Most of the team actually really enjoyed working with Perforce. Personally, I do miss git, but I acknowledge that for an Unreal Engine project, Perforce is a lot better. And I also found it pretty nice to work with. The documentation was pretty good, and they have a lot of tutorials, guide, and demonstration videos, which have been very helpful during the setup. It's very useful to be able to follow along every single click.

[pwecie]

My mental decline, as illustrated in Perforce. Fuck Perforce wHY IS PERFORCE INDUSTRY STANDARD???

For those who don’t know: Perforce or p4v is an application that allows people to check out files from a drive remotely and work on it from another drive so that multiple people can work on different aspects of one big project at the same time from different locations. Like submitting files to a shared folder in Google Drive, but without Google as the middle man. Of course, shit don’t always work right.

Above is my revision history of my project that has to be submitted after my Unreal Engine (game engine) files didn’t save right and fucking disappeared. Thankfully, my un-converted Autodesk Maya (3D modeling software) modkit (set of assets to build a level in a game engine) file was still there but holy shit if that didn’t save my work I was going to jump off a bridge.

[clownbabycarnival]

the battle has continued but we've paused the unreal fight and moved to the next: version control. unintentionally wrote over people's work when i reconciled files that SOMEHOW dont get added to my project. theyve been mostly undone by now but . jesus christ

[piratevis]

#00248

If you've ever come across a GitHub project site and wondered what it was all about (or just how to download the project), then this course by Stephen Ulibarri is a great short course.

My plan is to use both GitHub and Perforce as follows:

GitHub: for building Unreal Engine from source and testing out C++ code

Perforce (Helix Core): for Unreal Engine projects and its assets (eg. Houdini files)

[digitalcreationsllc]

Microsoft Discovers Critical RCE Flaw in Perforce Helix Core Server

Four vulnerabilities, including a critical one, have been discovered in the widely used Perforce Helix Core Server, posing a significant risk to organizations in the gaming, government, military, and technology sectors.

[mylearnings519]

The significance of version control systems in DevOps, and which ones have you worked with?

Version control systems (VCS) play a significant role in DevOps by providing a structured and controlled way to manage the source code and configuration of software projects. Their significance in DevOps can be summarized as follows: Collaboration: VCS enables multiple developers to work on the same codebase simultaneously. It ensures that changes made by different team members can be integrated…

[cerealmonster15]

BUT ALSO I HAVENT FIGURED OUT THE RIDDLE ANTENNAS IDK WHAT TO DOOOO LOL… my yarn weft tries fell through and the wig itself isn’t long enough to cut from to make new wefts… im worried about color matching from other wigs….

[cosmogyros]

I haven't properly done language studies in so long that I felt like I'd forgotten everything I'd ever known about anything (not an uncommon feeling, honestly), but last night before bed I did a little Croatian study and then read in French for a while and then read in German for a while more, and oh man, it was so nice and gentle on my brain... so much gentler than the internet... I should do that more.

[dsudis]

🌹

Taking the "random" parts of the instruction far too seriously, I first randomly selected a number between 1 and 5 (the number of WIPs I currently have) and got 2, which signified The One Where Dream Is De-Aged. Then I did a search on the document for "." and found there were 1,847 of them, so I selected a random number between 1 and 1,847 and got 628, which turned out to be part of the ellipsis in this sentence:

He was not at all sure which part of himself would win out, and for now... he had Hob, and a full belly, and a book.

[mockramblings]

As a current dog owner, I am profoundly irritated at how accurate this is.

[doctorworm]

probably not going to get to watch wrestling again until the start of next week which means i will be fully 2-3 weeks behind. which is fine. that’s fine.

[lm-thallen]

I wanted to start working on one of my Unreal game prototype from earlier this year again during the holidays... only to find half of the files had just vanished and the remaining ones are filled with compilation errors due to requiring the disappeared files to function.

I'm fine this is fine

[matchaisspent]

Love this shirt so much!

[berkeley-mews]

thanks so much for the tag!! <3 let's see about narrowing the choices down...

i am going to be very brave & actually tag some friends & moots!! @the-clockwork-three @auguriesoflight @ippokampos @stalinqrad @wollstonecraftianhorror and of course anybody else that happens to see this and wants to participate :)

this is silly but I still think it’s fun :)

tagged in by @nosfemmeatu

rules: list your top 5 films of all time in a poll and have people vote on which one best matches your vibe

tagging @shyshitter, @lovelymundane, @yonicjesus, and @friends-call-me-snow-miser <3

[genderkoolaid]

I was more or less stunned by what had happened. I had been prepared for criticism and ridicule - I was accustomed to them. But it had never occurred to me that people might want to hound and persecute me for my change in role. I had lived as a woman because that was my social standing, and had been made fun of and called 'half-man', and now when I had faced the situation and righted the grotesquely false position in which I had lived so long, it seemed that the public would damn me because I had once, perforce [by force, by necessity], worn skirts. I tried to get other hospital work. I went to the men who had been my chiefs and told them the truth and asked their aid in securing another position; to a man they turned me down. I tried to get other sorts of work and failed tor the same reason as soon as I gave my name. Then my family employed counsel and instituted proceedings to have my name legally changed; and the medical school from which I had been graduated served notice on us that if we persisted they would rescind my diploma and have me disbarred from practice.

— excerpt from Letter from Alan Hart to Mary Roberts Rinehart, August 3, 1921, on the subject of his transition from female to male and the impact of being publicly outed by a woman who recognized him. Alan Hart was one of the first men to get a hysterectomy in the US, and pioneered the use of X-rays in the diagnosis of tuberculosis, which ended up being crucial to treatment as the disease was asymptomatic early on.

[suppermariobroth]

The Wii U kiosk demo for Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze contains a text file called dummy.txt in its data that contains only a single line of text: "i'm here for perforce".

While this is very likely referring to the Perforce enterprise development suite, which was likely used by the development team to manage the project, a humorous alternative to this is that the developers could have meant "I'm here for performance" and simply misspelled the word.

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