What are some good (free or open-source) Version-control packages for developing games, and what are any game-specific issues in using them? Update There is a better version at Version Control Issues. If you want to copy over your Answers/Comments from here to there, please do so now. Then vote to close this Question. |
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If you're going to have multiple people working on your game it's much, much easier in my experience to use a distributed version control system (I use Mercurial) just because it makes merges so much simpler. But remember, you can use a different version control system for your binary assets. For instance, you can get the Mercurial bigfiles extension ( http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/BigfilesExtension ) to have your assets stored in the same Mercurial repo, but only fetch the binaries you need when you need them. After changing from Subversion to Mercurial for my hobby game project, I would never go back to Subversion because of how much easier it is to merge changes made by different developers in a distributed system like Mercurial. |
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One of the best packages is Subversion, an open-source, multi-platform version-control package. There's an excellent (Windows) front-end for it, called TortoiseSVN plus a free on-line book at Version Control with Subversion. For a general introduction to how VC works, see An Introduction to Version Control. I've had no problems using Subversion with Blender .blend files, I can't say how well it does with other binary data types. |
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John's post covers it. One important consideration: if you're going to have a lot of assets (gigs and gigs), like many games do, you will probably want to steer away from a DVCS. They aren't designed for many large binary files and don't tend to handle them well. The non-free industry standard for games is Perforce. |
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I personally use Mercurial. There is an asset management oriented VCS from AVID called Alienbrain http://www.nxn-software.com/ which used to be heavily marketed towards game developers. |
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Where I've worked, I have encountered Perforce, Subversion (with TortoiseSVN) and Git. I've been using Git only a fraction of the time I've worked with Perforce and Subversion, but for source control, I prefer it over the other two hands-down. Git has a steep learning curve, but it offers the most flexibility, especially with regard to working on parallel features collaboratively; I find Perforce and Subversion's branching capabilities to be lacking. What Git isn't good at is asset storage. Both Perforce and Subversion are better than Git in this regard, and I've seen both used for the task -- TortoiseSVN is great for non-programmers to work with when they just want to "get their stuff in". |
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I have been using Mercurial for a bit now with some of the XNA development I've been working on with a friend. We don't have Gigs of stuff though so we haven't had any problems. Besides Perforce as munificent mentioned another non-free (although it also has a 2 user non-expiring license) is AlienBrain. |
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One that you don't host yourself. If your game is open source, I recommend going with public VCS hosting for the added piece of mind that comes from knowing your house could burn down and your work would not be lost. CodePlex, SourceForge, and Google Code are all fine choices. Personally, I use CodePlex. I can't speak to the others, but CodePlex natively supports Mercurial and Team Foundation Server (TFS). They also provide Subversion support via a SVN<->TFS bridge; in other words, if you use their TFS hosting option, you can use any SVN client instead of a TFS client. If your game is not open source, you still might consider using a "closed" VCS hosting service to get the same security. Personally, I would recommend Mercurial, for the many reasons others have listed here. It also gives you a fallback measure should the host's (i.e. CodePlex's) servers ever get hit by a meteor: you will still have your local Mercurial repository and history. However, I am still using TFS and have had a great experience with it. While not a distributed VCS, TFS does have a nifty feature called 'shelve sets', which enables you to push ('shelve') changes to the server without actually checking them in. This gives you a means of "backing up" unfinished work without actually committing it, or sharing unfinished work with other team members (shelve sets are shareable). |
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