Subversion with games and Visual Studio

I just use SourceSafe 2005. So easy to configure. Plus I got it free.

Countless studios use Perforce, which is really just a kick ass source management tool. It is also free for 2 users / 5 workspaces.

Well, I can't speak for a team who is involved in Game Development, but I certainly use Visual Studio. Simply because I have it, and I paid for it, and its damn easy to use.

I'm sure there are many compilers and IDE's out there that are just as useful, but for my general development I haven't really needed anything else. Though I don't use Visual SourceSafe, I use CVS...

Plus, these days MSDN is very useful to development. I haven't really had much in the way of Game Projects going of late as they are more business oriented and tend to be specific tools for making my job easier.

VSS is a horrible product. Anyone who's used it on a large scale or long term project will agree. They have an un-corrupt tool you're supposed to run frequently to prevent it from breaking itself. Tool or no, it will break if you hit 3 gig of versioned assets.

My company found out about the problems w/ VSS the hard way. Since then we've been using Subversion exclusively, and it is one nice chunk of software. TortoiseSVN is a a nice windows explorer plugin that makes commiting and updaing, and damn-near everything that SVN does, just a single click. They also have a gui based merge tool.

All around, an svn backend and a tortoise front end make for a very nice experience.

My advice, though, would be to move your .obj trees out of your source trees. If subversion has to look at a lot of .objs it can slow down your local repository operations considerably. If you move the .objs it's very snappy.

I use Subversion on a regular basis for both code and assets - a little clunky at times but acceptable - and I've used VSS and AlienBrain in the past. VSS is just horrible, and AlienBrain works fairly well but has a completely pointless 'shiny UI' that seems to slow the whole thing down and use more memory, instead of just using standard Windows controls.

I started using Subversion over a year ago, and have since used it for all my programming projects, CS projects, CS homework (LaTeX documents), and sometimes random stuff like setup projects. I've used it for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 projects.

We wrote a game in one of our CS classes and used Subversion hosted on a Linux server + TortoiseSVN on Windows. Our repository stored code + assets although we had way more code than assets. It worked wonderfully.

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Original post by haro Countless studios use Perforce, which is really just a kick ass source management tool. It is also free for 2 users / 5 workspaces.

Yeah, I looked at Perforce too. The only reason I looked at Subversion was because of sticker shock from looking at other solutions (Alienbrain, Perforce, SurroundSCM)

So from what I gather, Subversion is pretty good. I'll give it a whirl.

AnkhSVN(pops) is the subversion plugin for VS.NET. I find it quite useful, as well as the aforementioned TortoiseSVN.

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Original post by gregs AnkhSVN(pops) is the subversion plugin for VS.NET. I find it quite useful, as well as the aforementioned TortoiseSVN.

Saw that too. I guess I'll just have to give it a try. I was going to get it all set up yesterday, but somehow we have used all 300GB of our shared network drive. Caused my backup to fail...I was NOT pleased.

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Original post by benutne It would appear the change management software that caters to game development is REALLY expensive.

Is there source-management software that caters specifically to game development? I was under the impression that they generally just catered to large projects with multiple developers, all checking in changes at once.

I've used CVS, Subversion and Starteam. Subversion is by far the best. It's very lightweight and easy to configure. If you want to make a backup of your repository you can just tar the entire directory. You don't have to mess with a bunch of moving parts; like an external database. The best thing about it is that it just works.

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Original post by kSquared Quote: Original post by benutne It would appear the change management software that caters to game development is REALLY expensive. Is there source-management software that caters specifically to game development? I was under the impression that they generally just catered to large projects with multiple developers, all checking in changes at once.

It tends to be systems that have explicit support for things like 3DS Max or Maya, integration into common art apps type stuff. I think AlienBrain has that sort of thing.

I've used alienware and subversion and prefer subversion to that. Keep in mind I usually don't support OSS because its for communists. But sometimes I have an open mind.