game development best practices

Game Development

SCM Best Practices

Sven Erik KnopPerforce Software

2© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Overview

What makes game development so challenging?

Workflow Git in Game Development

Administration


• Why is Games Development so hard?• Besides the obvious, I mean…

• Average AAA game:• 100s of 1000s of files

• 1TB+ code and assets at HEAD

• 50GB + changes a day

• 100+ team members

Challenges in Games Development


Single of Source of Truth


• Continuous integration• Builds take minutes

(incremental) to hours (full)

• Smoke tests?

• Full tests?

• How do you deal with large teams and many changes?

• How do you deal with large binary files?

Consequences


• Images?

• 3D models?

• Sound files?

• Locking!

• Across branches?

3-way merge for binary assets?

Codeline Organization


• Why do we branch?• Different policies

• Decoupling from fast-changing code line

• Isolation of tasks

• Mainline model• All changes flow back to a single

trunk/mainline

• Development branches

• Milestone and release branches

Branching models


Single Code Line

Head

Stable Head still stable?


Development branches

Long-lived development branches can cause problems


Task/Feature branches

Keeping feature branches short-lived avoids severe merge conflicts


Milestone and release branches

Stabilize in separate branchMerge fixes, ignore hacks


• Usually do not need all files

• Reduce space

• Speed up workspace syncs

• Perforce Helix methods for filtering:• Manual workspaces views

• Template workspace

• Virtual streams

• Alternative

• Split project into separate code lines

Views for filtering

codeline

ws1

ws2


Component-based

Shared trunk

Separate trunks


Helix Streams


• Git repositories and Perforce Helix (Core) repositories in one place

• Perforce Helix 2017.1 introduces Helix4Git

Can I develop games using Git?

ArtistsDevelopers

Perforce Helix

Administration

• Server sizing and setup

• Archiving and purging

• Replication


• More RAM is always the right answer (Sven rule #2)

• Keep your database, logs,and journal local• Ideally on SSD

• Depots usually live onseparate storage• Faster Backups

• Shared replica storage

• Be aware of network bottlenecks

Server hardware


• You can overwhelm storage of any size• Especially with generated files (artefacts)

• Perforce Helix has archiving features• Declare separate archiving depots (type “archive”) on cheap disks

• Use ‘p4 archive’ to move file content (history is preserved)

• Use ‘p4 restore’ to move archived files back in place

• Consider using +S filetype for generated files• Beware of limitations: avoid branching of +S files

Do you need every version of every file?


Replication

master

failover proxy

forward

edge

Buildedge

shared drive

Main Site


• Outsourcers typically need a subset of the whole project

• DVCS-style approach:• Use independent Helix server and

push and fetch to transfer changes

• Replica-style approach:• Use edge server, potentially in the

cloud in their region

• Control amount of stored files:

• db.replication=cache

• p4 cachepurge

Outsourcing


• Perforce Helix is a great choice for your game developers• Artists and developers collaborate

using a Single Source of Truth

• There are many strategies to keep the size in check• Syncing files for users

• Replicas for build systemsand remote sites

• Archiving and purging

Conclusion

Questions? Reach me on Twitter: @p4sven

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