Greater consumer demands for performance, features, and graphics have forced design studios to keep pace in a rapidly-changing industry while simultaneously securing all their development assets — source code, binary data, requirements, documents, and more. In this webinar, Sven Erik Knop, Principal Solutions Engineer for Perforce Software, details the game development best practices achieved with Helix versioning engine for optimal game design. See firsthand what the best game studios already know.

1. Game Development
SCM Best Practices
Sven Erik Knop
Perforce Software

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Overview
What makes game
development so challenging?
Workflow Git in Game Development
Administration

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• 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

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Single of Source of Truth

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• 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

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• Images?
• 3D models?
• Sound files?
• Locking!
• Across branches?
3-way merge for binary assets?

7. Codeline Organization

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• 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

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Single Code Line
Head
Stable Head still stable?

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Development branches
Long-lived development branches can cause
problems

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Task/Feature branches
Keeping feature branches
short-lived avoids severe
merge conflicts

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Milestone and release branches
Stabilize in separate branch
Merge fixes, ignore hacks

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• 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

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Component-based
Shared trunk
Separate trunks

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Helix Streams

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• 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

17. Administration
• Server sizing and setup
• Archiving and purging
• Replication

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• More RAM is always the right answer
(Sven rule #2)
• Keep your database, logs,
and journal local
• Ideally on SSD
• Depots usually live on
separate storage
• Faster Backups
• Shared replica storage
• Be aware of network bottlenecks
Server hardware

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• 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?

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Replication
master
failover proxy
forward
edge
Build
edge
shared drive
Main Site

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• 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

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• 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 systems
and remote sites
• Archiving and purging
Conclusion

23. Questions? Reach me on Twitter: @p4sven

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