Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Many years later, I was working on a small project, and one afternoon a panicked teammate informed
me that our development server went down and no one could work. We were only two days away from
a milestone, and the team thought we were doomed.
I said, as I created a full list of our
development files and posted them outside my office. I reintroduced our team to SneakerNet
“
Nonsense!
”
—
and they
used a pencil to
a file from the list and a diskette to move the latest copy of the file from
my desktop to theirs where they could work on it.
“
check out
”
We made our milestone, and no files were lost or destroyed. Sometimes an old way of doing something
isn
'
t so bad after all.
Source control management is a common process used by game development teams
everywhere. Game development is simply too hard and too risky to manage without
it. Nonprogrammers find source control systems unwieldy and will complain for a
while, but they will get used to it pretty quickly. Even 3ds Max has plug-ins for
source control systems so everyone on the team can use it.
Outside of source control, many companies choose to track these bits and pieces with
the help of a database, showing what state the asset is in and whether it is ready to be
installed in the game. Source control repositories can help you manage who is work-
ing on something, but they aren
'
t that good at tracking whether something is
“
good
enough
t need anything more than an Excel
spreadsheet to keep a list of each file, who touched it last, what
”
to be in the game. For that, you don
'
s in the file, and
why it is important to your game. You could also write a little PHP/MySQL portal
site and put a complete content management intranet up on your local network to
track files.
To help you put your own version control process in place, I
'
ll introduce you to some
of the more popular version control tools that professional game developers use in
their practices, I
'
ll also tell you which ones to avoid. Of course, keep in mind that
there is no perfect, one-size-fits-all tool or solution. The important thing is that you
put some type of process together and that you do it at the beginning of any project.
'
A Little History
Visual SourceSafe from Microsoft
Visual SourceSafe is the source repository that was distributed with Microsoft
'
s
Visual Studio until the 2010 release, and it is an excellent example of
—
“
You get what
you pay for.
What attracted most people to this product was an easy-to-use GUI
interface and an extremely simple setup. You can be up and running on SourceSafe
in 10 minutes if you don
'
t type slowly.
The biggest problem with SourceSafe is how it stores the source repository. If you
dig a bit into the shared files where the repository is stored, you
”
'
ll find a data
directory with a huge tree of
files with odd names like AAAAAAAB.AAA and
