I never posted in TA forums yet buy I often read and learn about what you guys are sharing every day. It helps me to be in touch with console and AAA development since I may return someday to it.
Now I work at Nextive/Globant, we are a not-so-small and fast growing company developing for mobile and social networks. Source files we need to do Version Control are mainly PSD, AI and FLA (Flash) formats, but we may like to keep track of relationships between these sources and embeded/linked bitmaps, textures, fonts, and so. We all work on Mac.
In the near future we may be working with Maya and diffuse textures as well, I don’t think complex shaders are going to be neccesary.
We have been considering some options, and Alien Brain, Fuzzion (still working their Mac version) and Creative Suite Drive 3 would meet better our needs.
So now I would like to know your experience with these tools and which one do you think is the best.
If your needs are simple- and it sounds like they are- you may be able to find an off the shelf solution for this sort of stuff, but I’m not familiar with them, especially in this space. I’d avoid Alien Brain based on what I’ve heard- very pretty, nice features, but unstable and hard to support and expand. No personal experience though.
Ultimately every studio ends up rolling their own solution, for good reason. But like I said, I’m not sure all the things that exist in this space that could fit your needs, unfortunately. But you’re heads above the rest simply by the fact you recognize the need to do it!
Thanks a lot Rob.
Yes, that’s the impression I had with Alien Brain when I tested it years ago, and we ended up using Tortoise SVN and cleaning up binaries older revisions , manually. :nod:
Any other second opinion from you guys would be most welcome.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a great version control system/asset management tool for large amounts of binary assets. AlienBrain looks like it is improving quite a bit in recent years, but my fellow developers at work are wary of using it because of problems they had with previous versions. As for SVN it can grow very large if everything is in the same repository. If there are logical separations you can make, it may be worth having more than one repository and reference the other repositories using svn externals.
As for tracking resources, I suppose it depends on how where that data is supposed to be kept? I imagine that the flash file is the major concern? Perhaps a script can be created that writes all the referenced paths (in the flash file) into a “side-car” text file that is saved along with the flash file in svn? Once you have that data in a text file format you can likely have other tools that parse the references and build you are reference tree (or whatever else for tracking). I will be honest, I deal more with 3D than flash, but have used something similar with Unity, that ended up working fairly well (alternatives would be pushing the path data to a database instead and go from there).
Michael, Perforce is THE great version control system for large binary assets. It’s fast enough to saturate a 1GB network if your server and clients have enough disk speed.
It’s free to try with two clients, so just test it. Sure it’s expensive, but good things often do come with a price tag…
[QUOTE=samivRMD;12099]Michael, Perforce is THE great version control system for large binary assets. It’s fast enough to saturate a 1GB network if your server and clients have enough disk speed.
It’s free to try with two clients, so just test it. Sure it’s expensive, but good things often do come with a price tag…
SamiV.[/QUOTE]
Agreed 100%.
There is no comparison for Perforce. SVN, Git, AlienBrain, etc., are all poor alternatives in comparison. The cost of Perforce is easily offset by the expense of heartache and developer time during development.
Ah Perforce, that is a good suggestion. Some of my colleagues swear by it, but others (mostly those who love a lot of branches) end up going with something like git. In the end what I was trying to get at, was for something that tracks flash integration you will likely have to roll your own solution. Perforce would be a nice tool to get the job done though.
Programmers are realizing how much better hg and git are for source control, and I absolutely agree. However nothing can replace Perforce right now for large binary assets, and splitting content between various source control packages can lead to lots of problems (you lose your atomicity).
