Understanding Version Control: A Beginner's Guide for Solo Devs, Indies, and Noobs

[@lightfire276]

You are just awesome! Your content is just amazing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. I hope you can make a UE5 roadmap because I have started learning the engine, and there are a lot of things to learn. If you can provide an overview of a roadmap to understand the bigger picture and to knwo the big concepets of it , it will be nice and helpful. Thanks again kevin

[@livinfreestyle6727]

I know what I want to do for the road map, just juggling the time to do it vs making new vids for you all. Thanks for watching!

[@fael097]

I was entirely convinced and decided to try perforce after watching this video, sold by "solo indie dev" and "easiest source control". I'm generally considered a power user, and yet I've never seen something so ridiculously difficult to set up and use. In fact, after two entire days, I haven't been able to fully get it working properly in unreal, and I would have lost my entire game if I hadn't backed it up manually into my NAS. proper documentation and instructions are basically non existent and you probably need to be an experienced programmer, be able to naturally read assembly, binary, and be a clairvoyant in order to set this up alone. Thanks for nothing

[@livinfreestyle6727]

That definitely doesn't sound fun. I did a quick sanity check with the community in discord (people I know who have recently set it up). The setup times ranged from 30 minutes it 3-5 hours. The longer ones generally because of some networking issue or troubleshooting. That is actually faster than I remember it took me (took me a couple days I think, maybe cuz I was trying the whole AWS thing). That said, two things that did seem to be a theme. 1. The setup docs seem to assume you already know what you are doing. 2. Everyone so far has said it was worth it. One of our community members threw out the idea of a perforce setup and tips thread too, so we'll probably do that in the forums if you ever join the discord.

[@laxatory]

I will never not use perforce. It's so good I love it.

[@livinfreestyle6727]

Do you remember how long it took you to setup? and then the second time when you helped a community member? Glad you find it useful for sure. Saves me all the time

[@laxatory]

@@livinfreestyle6727 Setting it up actually wouldnt't have taken that long, the only thing that i got caught up on was needing to setup an inbound rule on my network firewall to allow other people to connect to my pc, since I was hosting. I didn't know I needed to do this, and nowhere in the perforce documentation or youtube tutorials mentioned this, they just assume you already know how networking works. Otherwise, the tutorials online were very easy to follow, there isn't much work involved in setting it up, and if you're someone who is just joining in on a project, and not actually hosting the server, you literally have NO work to do other than just download the client and connect to the hosts IP. Very simple to setup, if I had to do it all over again I could have it done in less than 15 minutes probably.

[@FX_AnimationStudios]

Hello Kevin.. thanks soooo much for this video... I have a question.. in our case we are typical a 2 person team sometimes 3 or 4... we have a NAS on our studio... Im trying to understand all this so I created a test project in 5.4.2 in my NAS and followed the steps to start a muti user but locally... I couldnt get multiuser plugin to get activated... so I tried the same thing but in 5.3.2 and this time it worked... now im able to see all users on my project (its sooo cool BTW :)) ... if our plan is to always keep the project inhouse does it make sense to still look into perforce or other? also have you tried using multi user on 5.4.2? id like to see if the issue is only on my end. I even tried to open the 5.3.2 in 5.4.2... i see the plugin activated.. but when i want to use it.. it crashes 5.4.2. I hope i was clear..sorry for my english :). Also... I cannot afford to have the projects uploaded in the cloud beause of internet speed and our projects jump to 40gb easy... what can you recommend as a local pipeline and still benefit from versioning?

[@livinfreestyle6727]

You can just house the version control server on your local network. You don't have to use the cloud and some of our community members have just set it up on an extra computer they had for example. I have not actually tried the multi user editing workflow in Unreal, but it has a lot of version control like features plus the idea of multiple people working in the same world. It makes sense in my brain for something like environment, but a bit more difficult for other workflows like character. I've never used this professionally either, but it looks cool. You're actually the first person I've even heard of using it. You're english is great!

[@indigosteel]

This was so helpful, Thank You much! Do you have any plans on covering how to implement graphics settings to a project (for the user to change on the shipped game)?

[@livinfreestyle6727]

I think the plan is to just keep knocking back the topics that get us closer and closer to shipping a game. So that would be in there at some point.

[@claudiosaavedra7522]

Hello everyone, I've been setting up Helix Core on a Windows server at home for a while now. I got it working on localhost, but I can't access it from outside my local network. I tried using Cloudflare, but I wasn't successful. Does anyone have experience configuring Helix Core for remote access? Could you share a tutorial or guide me through the necessary steps? My goal is to be able to connect from anywhere, not just from my local network. I appreciate any help you can provide. Thanks in advance!

[@livinfreestyle6727]

This is definitely more of something I would post to a Perforce forum or troubleshooting site. You might have better luck in our discord forum-questions, but in general it's pretty p4 related and also your own personal network setup

[@vintire3885]

I love your tutorials so much! I just started game development and I was wondering if you recommend note-taking, and if so, how I should structure or take that notes that could help me with my learning? Thank you!

[@livinfreestyle6727]

I think if notetaking is your style and sure. I’m not personally a note taker I think that’s partially because I can always go back and reference the video whenever I need to, but I do hear that if you actually write it, see it and read it. It’ll stick in your mind better.

[@breathlessblizzard]

Great info. What VCS systems are usually used for film/animation work? I tried setting up a Perforce for an animation team once, but ran into the same problems you mentioned. Curious to know what the common alternatives are.

[@livinfreestyle6727]

I never saw one used for the actual visual assets. The code and tools etc was different but all the DCC stuff, never saw at any of the studios I worked at

[@peterallely5417]

Does perforce work with Dropbox?

[@livinfreestyle6727]

They are separate so dropbox is pretty invisible. I think the only thing that would be strange is if you tried to go back in dropbox history for a folder that also had perforce

[@mikelkram]

Thanks for the video. Now I will hope could see a tutorial on using Perforce for existing project.

[@livinfreestyle6727]

You're welcome. We gotta get back to some engine stuff first, but I can put it on the list

[@KostasMachete]

I use git now but I gotta ask, is perforce better, quicker or anything like that? I also got LFS which gives me 50gb/month for 5€/month because of a storage limit, btw

[@livinfreestyle6727]

better? It's like anything else. If you ask a git person, they love git, if you ask a P4 person they love p4. For me, decision was easy because at the time, git didn't handle binary files well and Unreal Engine is pretty much all binary files. P4 handles it well. In my work XP we use git for tools and P4 for game dev. I've used LOTS of version control software. Subversion, Source Safe, CVS and more. I use git for code in basic form (even in my solo dev work), I am not a power git user. With all that XP, git is cumbersome imho. It's tough to wrap my head around AND the lack of integrated UI is nuts to me (I know I"m going to get torched here, but yes I've used Kraken (paid for it etc), Sublime, tons of them). Its prob my art brain but Perforce is far easier barrier of entry in my experience especially for creatives

[@drakouzdrowiciel9237]

I’m impressed with the quality of the content presented in this video. As someone who works alone on small projects, I found it incredibly helpful to learn more about Perforce and how it can be integrated into my workflow.

[@livinfreestyle6727]

Awesome to hear how helpful this was. Thx for letting me know

[@sixtogomez9678]

Have tons of friends working in the games industry and each company they work for uses perforce except 1 that uses Git.

[@livinfreestyle6727]

Generally I find the same. Largely due to the binary files (git really didn't have anything for this til recently), but also it's simpler imho

[@SimonSlav-GameMakingJourney]

the branching is something I wish I had learned sooner

[@livinfreestyle6727]

That's prob a good call, but even if you haven't gotten branches going yet, STILL saved me many times