Game Development Best Practices
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The document discusses best practices for source control management (SCM) in game development, highlighting the challenges posed by large file sizes, team collaboration, and efficiently managing code changes. It emphasizes strategies like branching models, server setup, and archiving to maintain organization and performance. Using tools like Perforce Helix can facilitate project management while ensuring effective collaboration among artists and developers.
Game Development Best Practices
- 1. Game Development SCM Best Practices Sven Erik Knop Perforce Software
- 2. 2© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Overview What makes game development so challenging? Workflow Git in Game Development Administration
- 3. 3© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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
- 4. 4© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Single of Source of Truth
- 5. 5© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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
- 6. 6© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • Images? • 3D models? • Sound files? • Locking! • Across branches? 3-way merge for binary assets?
- 8. 8© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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
- 9. 9© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Single Code Line Head Stable Head still stable?
- 10. 10© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Development branches Long-lived development branches can cause problems
- 11. 11© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Task/Feature branches Keeping feature branches short-lived avoids severe merge conflicts
- 12. 12© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Milestone and release branches Stabilize in separate branch Merge fixes, ignore hacks
- 13. 13© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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
- 14. 14© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Component-based Shared trunk Separate trunks
- 15. 15© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Helix Streams
- 16. 16© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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
- 18. 18© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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
- 19. 19© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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?
- 20. 20© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. Replication master failover proxy forward edge Build edge shared drive Main Site
- 21. 21© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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
- 22. 22© Perforce Software Inc. All Rights Reserved. • 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
- 24. Like us on Facebook and LinkedIn, and follow @perforce on Twitter. Catch up on our latest blog posts.
Editor's Notes
- #4: [Animation] 2 steps The problem with games (in general) is the size of the assets: The move to high definition consoles increases the size of the assets into a game manifold Games used to be delivered on a single Floppy disk! Remember floppy disks? 720KB! Then came CDs. 700MB. Then came multiple CDs. N * 700MBs Now most (Windows) games come on DVDs – 4.5 GB per layer, 8.5 GB for a dual-layer DVD-R. Ever installed Shadow of Mordor? 5 DVDs, or a single 25 GB download – so you better have high speed broadband. On the console that is a single Blu Ray disk, 25GB as a single layer. These games are the finished article, all assets compiled and compressed – in HD format. 4K is looming, which will quadruple the space requirements again! So, what are the consequences?
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