Closed-Source Game SVN?

I don't believe that any exist. The incentive to provide free SVN hosting is generally that the projects being hosted, licensed as open source, in turn benefit everyone. If the hosting benefits only the hosted project members, then there's a lesser incentive - though it's actually more altruistic.

Unfortunately, altruism is rare.

Buy some hosting. It's relatively cheap. Dreamhost gives you SVN alongside web hosting, email, virtually unlimited storage and databases and much more for $11 a month. If you can't afford $11/mo, then you'll have to look at something duct-taped like using a distributed version control system (Git, Bazaar, Mercurial) and email changesets between team members.

Good luck.

Actually, I've used XP-Dev which allows hosting of non-open source projects.

You can use Beanstalk for this. Beanstalk's basic plan is free of charge, but restricts you to one repository with three users (just send them email invites) and 100 MB. This actually used to be 20 MB back when I was using it for our class project two months ago. It still won't be enough for a large game's assets, but it should be enough for quite a lot of code. They also have a nice web interface for browsing the repository and looking at comments and commit contents.

Apart from Beanstalk, some other SVN hosts also offer free hosting plans without forcing any license on you. Just shop around.

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Original post by Oluseyi I don't believe that any exist. The incentive to provide free SVN hosting is generally that the projects being hosted, licensed as open source, in turn benefit everyone. If the hosting benefits only the hosted project members, then there's a lesser incentive - though it's actually more altruistic. Unfortunately, altruism is rare. Buy some hosting. It's relatively cheap. Dreamhost gives you SVN alongside web hosting, email, virtually unlimited storage and databases and much more for $11 a month. If you can't afford $11/mo, then you'll have to look at something duct-taped like using a distributed version control system (Git, Bazaar, Mercurial) and email changesets between team members. Good luck.

I got a coupon for Dreamhost for like $97 off a year subscription. So you can get the unlimited plan with domain for $22.40 for an entire year. Even at $11/month its still not bad for what you get. They can even bill you monthly if you don't happen to have the money to get a year+.

Setting up the SVN is all done through their control panel so there is nothing to it. Using Tortoise to handle all the SVN stuff I've not had a problem yet.

I'm using unfuddle. It has treated me well so far. I recommend checking it out.

If you have DSL connection and a separate desktop laying around you can just load ubuntu server on it and apt-get SVN and be up and running in 30 minutes with a repository. Might be a better solution than buying some hosting. The only problem being is if the server dies.

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Original post by Sirisian The only problem being is if the server dies.

Might be best to buy a new harddrive for it and plan some kind of regular backup strategy. From what I remember, backing up SVN is a bit less trivial than just copying the directory structure, but a shell script should still take care of it.

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Original post by lightbringer From what I remember, backing up SVN is a bit less trivial than just copying the directory structure...

Properly, you create an SVN dump file (using svnadmin dump), and then archive that. To restore, you can load (svnadmin load), though that's generally an all-or-nothing proposition - no incremental loading that way. However, you can dump specific revision intervals, so you can create an incremental backup that way.

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Original post by Oluseyi I don't believe that any exist. The incentive to provide free SVN hosting is generally that the projects being hosted, licensed as open source, in turn benefit everyone. If the hosting benefits only the hosted project members, then there's a lesser incentive - though it's actually more altruistic. Unfortunately, altruism is rare. Buy some hosting. It's relatively cheap. Dreamhost gives you SVN alongside web hosting, email, virtually unlimited storage and databases and much more for $11 a month. If you can't afford $11/mo, then you'll have to look at something duct-taped like using a distributed version control system (Git, Bazaar, Mercurial) and email changesets between team members. Good luck.

I've hosted git and svn repositories on my home pc - works just fine, the traffic is not big and at least one node (me) has very good bandwidth. There is that other alternative, "doing it yourself" :-)

I wouldn't trust any free service for closed source projects.

Regarding SVN backups - I've been bitten by this before, so I feel compelled to provide a hot tip:

Do not back up with --deltas. You want the full revisions (they contain redundant information - but at least that will compress nicely). If something goes wrong with your delta backup, you can find yourself SOL.


The specific problem I had: binary file that didn't have the MIME type set correctly when it was first committed (you do have SVN configured for all the file extensions you use, right?). When I tried to restore my backup, that revision wouldn't load (checksum didn't match the file with trashed line-endings), couldn't be edited by hand or with svndumpfilter (which - fun to find out - won't handle --delta dumps at all), and consequently no subsequent revisions would load either. Had to recover and then re-dump from the original.

I have a windows home server for tons of purposes like file server, full backup system, etc.

on it, i installed visualsvnserver, which is free. it can of course be installed on any pc with windows on, so if you have some spare system around (maybe the old pc downloading torrents all day? :)), install it there.

i like windows home server. really a relaxing thing.

but i like the tips on backing up svn here. i normally don't, as if the server dies, i still have the projects on my pc. i don't really care about commit history, as i only do small projects. but still, i'll think about doing full backups of the repositories.

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Original post by Sirisian If you have DSL connection and a separate desktop laying around you can just load ubuntu server on it and apt-get SVN and be up and running in 30 minutes with a repository. Might be a better solution than buying some hosting. The only problem being is if the server dies.

i bet the energy for an old PC costs more than a cheap virtual root server.

If it's supported, you can also use a DVCS such as Mercurial and not worry about backing up the server since your local copies will themselves be full repositories.

Using a distributed version control system does not mean you don't need a central server.
You still need one, so everyones branches can be merged together on a regular basis and in a small (new) project, it's mostly not feasible to work on independent branches for too long.

The real cheapo-solution would be to use a team member's desktop PC and guarantee it to be online in a certain time frame.

I'd go with a cheap online server nevertheless. 10€/$ for a FTP/Web/SVN/Wiki/whatever server really is a good investment.