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In the case of this tutorial my source files will be close to the finished files for the sake of simplicity. These files would be compressed, tested and packaged neatly and basically what your players will need to play the game. These files are only for development and generally are not released to the public unless you are making it open source.ДЇinished game files would be dllвЂ™s, tgaвЂ™s, wadвЂ™s, mdlвЂ™s etc. What do I mean by this? Source files in this case would be C++ code, Photoshop art, and model files such as obj, dae etc., uncompiled map files. I would highly suggest keeping your Perforce Depot/Repository on a separate drive to the one where you will be doing your coding.Дepending on your preference as a developer you might keep your source files separate from your finished game files or relatively close. The first thing you will need to do is set up the environment for working with Perforce. To further the parity I highly recommend using Dropbox or Mega to sync and backup your files online or even GoodSync to back up to a separate local drive. This is the most basic setup that allows for a basic level of parity in the case of drive failure.

Perforce visual client download code#

The client code will reside on drive where the Perforce depot will sit on drive.

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Since not everyone can afford premium server space or services to run Perforce this guide will walk you through a simple setup on a windows machine where both the server and client reside on Windows. This way if your work machine crashes you have a backup of the code on your server, If the server crashes you have a backup saved somewhere hopefully on a separate drive if you are smart about it or you can use the most local version on your PC, The issue with using the copy on your work machine is that you lose all versioning history. You would then have a copy on your work machine where you would create and edit code/assets, once you have checked that your changes work you can commit them to the server. The ideal setup for any versioning system would be to have the server on a dedicated machine with automated daily or weekly backups based on how often you make critical changes.

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At the end of the day you can use whichever you like so long as you use one because if you lose all your work or cannot revert to a previous working version of your code you have no-one to blame but yourself especially since they are all free and well documented. I have met plenty of people who swear by GIT or SVN and will probably try to convert you if you enter a conversation about which is best.

Perforce is not the only free system you can use for this purpose with other popular programs such as GIT, Subversion (SVN) and Mercurial all performing the same basic functions each with its own proвЂ™s and conвЂ™s. A system like this also serves as a backup in the case of system failure or human error and as a time machine to find where an issue was introduced. This is very useful for tracking bugs and issues within code and assets. This allows you to go back in time and check the differences against previous versions of the same files. The idea behind versioning (source control) is to create a base revision of all your files and for each change you make keep a version for that too. This is only an introduction to setting up the Perforce version control system for managing your games code and assets. I will only be covering what I think are the main features of Perforce and what is most useful for Game Developers. This tutorial is written in a generic manner so as that you can learn to use Perforce on any project you have regardless of Engine, API or SDK.