I need some help regarding perforce. We’d like to introduce it to our artists because we’d like a central place for our artwork which supports revisions, easy browsing and easy uploading and downloading of assets, all in a an artist friendly way.
The problem I face is that neither of the TAs has much experience with perforce. Also the artists mostly speak Chinese.
The P4Win client we have here by default has lots and lots of options, which I assume are really useful if you know what they do and actually need them. However I fear it’s waaaay too much for the artists to handle, as they basically only need “check in”, “check out” and “import” (in alienbrain terms). I don’t want them to break anything accidentially.
Now my question - how can I dumb down the whole Perforce experience? Is it possible to customize P4Win or is there a simpler client? The simpler the better (at my old company we even had people who didn’t grasp alienbrain ).
Also we deal with a lot of different projects and clients (we do outsourcing), so scripting elaborate tools to simplify stuff is out of the question. Ideally some simple FTP style interface (like the freeware Alienbrain client offers) with just the basic options would do.
About myself: I’ve been using Alienbrain a long time and I’m rather new to perforce itself. So yeah, I’m biased at the moment, but I’m open to anything that may solve our problem.
i am more technically minded but i’ve always prefered p4win. there is also p4v, which i’ve always felt was just kind of cluttered and confusing. in p4win you see just the server depot, in p4v you have both depot and client-side (local hard drive) tabs, which creates a ton of confusion in my experience. it’s very easy for people to get them confused and think that their files got deleted from the server, when they are actually just not sync’d locally.
there is also p4gt, which i have no experience with, but it is supposed to be a plugin available for your dcc program (maya, max, softimage, photoshop support). it may reduce the complexity for you, but at some point someone will still want to become well versed in p4win because it’s likely that at some point you’ll have to do some manual file wrangling.
P4v takes a little getting used to, especially coming from P4Win, but honestly I prefer it now. Perforce users might as well get used to P4v anyway, since P4Win is getting phased out and is no longer supported. P4v is cross-platform and much easier for them to maintain, it seems.
Back on topic, I’m not aware of any other full-featured clients. I think once you remove a few features from P4v/Win, you’re down to the level where your Favorite App can just integrate with Perforce directly.
If your artists still need a standalone Perforce client, but only for the most basic operations, I’d suggest just writing one. Perforce has APIs for various languages. If you know how to do something with the p4.exe command-line, you can pick up the direct API quickly, it’s pretty straightforward.
if the artists ever want to learn more then they can talk to the tech team and upgrade. I’d love if people show interest, but I feat the majority will see the whole perforce thing just as more boring non-artsy work. at least this was my experience when we introduced Alienbrain. Most artists prefer to deal as little as possible with it and unfortunately therefore never learn more than the basics.
for the tech artists and other admins we’ll use full featured clients. I’m just worried about the artists themselves - I’d like to keep it simple for them. their clients don’t need many features…actually the features can still exist in the artist’s clients. I just want them hidden or by default disabled so nobody presses a wrong button or gets confused by too many options calling us tech artists over to do all the asset management ourselves on their PCs.
The idea is to keep the artist’s client simple - easier learning curve, less confusion - we tech artists need to spend less time on perforce troubleshooting, having more time for other important stuff.
about DCC plugins: we’d also like the artists to import additional work files e.g. psd and ztl files which are not directly linked to a maya or max file. for some projects the artists will also export files in whatever format our clients need. they need to be able to import such files too. I remember in Alienbrain this never worked out very well, so we skipped DCC integration and gave the artists just a simple client with modified interface.
about writing our own stuff: this is basically the scenario I want to avoid.
p4v: would it be possible to customize the interface to remove/hide unnecessary functions which the regular artists never use? In that regard alienbrain was nice with it’s easily modifyable and scriptable interface.
I don’t believe you can tweak out P4v at that level, no.
Although the basic shell/Windows Explorer integration you get when you install P4v seems like it might be all your artists need. You just right-click a file in explorer, and choose an action under the “Perforce” menu.
EDIT: I failed at reading everyone’s replies before posting. Most of this stuff is already covered above so… +1 to those
P4GT was awesome sounding in concept, but the version I used was a nightmare. Granted this was one of the earlier revisions (1+ year ago), the menu bar would clone itself constantly in all programs and fail to ever load properly. In the end it cost us a ton of frustration so we bailed it to go back to P4Win, which I still think is by far the best of the group after using them after 4 years (but Adam’s right… it’s getting nuked). P4V made checking things out/in and general navigation more cryptic for reasons I couldn’t guess.
I’ve had zero problems with any artists learning P4 through my experience aside from a few ‘duh’ moments. I try to always reiterate to sync up whatever you’re working on often to avoid resolve issues, and you can easily check in/out any file from any of the programs by just right clicking them in the file browser and go from there.
I have found P4V so far the best(out-of-the-box) solution for Artists. I try to train them first with only basic needs(check-in, check-out, sync and add) and once they are comfortable with that, I move on with changelists, History, sync-to-revisions.
As far as Artist-friendly layout goes, I always wanted to write a standalone app which gives minimal (one-click) functionality for basic Perforce operations. But again, thats some coding work.
There is a feature called “Manage Custom Tools” in P4V Tools menu. Which lets you define a Tool(which is essentially a series of commands) to be associated with almost anything(files, folders, users, changelists, etc…) and it will show up in Tools menu as well as right-click context menu. And best part is that it can be mixture of P4 and Other commands.
So for example, you can define a tool which lets you sync to a Maya file, check it out and Open Maya with that particular file(all in one click).
Or you can write a post-submit-review tool to run some tasks on files in submitted changlists.
Once defined, all tools can be exported as an xml file and imported on other clients.
Thanks everyone - I think I’m going to stick with P4V even though most of the programmers which already use Perforce seem to like P4Win more.
The Manage Custom Tools features also sounds very useful - thanks for mentioning it!
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