From the very beginning (II): Perforce and UDK

Hi there!

In the first “From the very beginninng” post (http://thebladeremains.com/blog/from-the-very-beginning-redmine/) I spoke about some of the different software options available for project management. But, when talking about videogames, a version control software is a much more important issue.

When we started to think about Skara development, it was easy to decide which versions controller software to use. As long as we want to develop our game with Unreal, Perforce was the only valid option. UDK supports integration with Perforce, and even commits from UDK editor.

But let me tell you the truth: To be honest, Perforce hasn’t got any magic inside it. It works properly well but, for sure, it is not the best version controller I’ve used. It is everything but intuitive, and once you start to use it, you soon realize there are a lot of issues in which Perforce relies on the good practices adopted by the users.

We will speak about those practices later, and probably one of our programmers will be the most indicated person to do it. But for now, I will tell you about perforce installation.

Perforce installation

1. First of all, you need to download Perforce server from Perforce web (http://www.perforce.com/)
2. Install it on a machine. It will work better if it is a server, such as Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012.
3. Install Perfoce client on the client machines.
4. You will need to edit Perforce typemap in order for Perforce to automatically detect which files stored in the server are binary or text data. (If you need more information about this step, or step 5, I fully recommend to visit this web)
5. Besides, as long as we will be using Unreal Engine, we will need to add those UDK specific extensions.(.u, .uc, .upk, .udk).
6. Finally, enable source control in UDK. This can be done editing the file DefaultEditoruserSettings.ini in your folder UDK/UDKGame/Config.
7. Be careful with your binaries folder. It shouldn’t be versioned, given that there are some files wich are machine dependant, and UDK installation does not run properly if this folder’s content is replaced with the versioned binaries folder content. So far, we haven’t found a better solution. And we’re not very proud about this one, so, if anyone can throw this light on it, any idea will be welcomed.

Anyway, this have been a quick guide with only a few steps and some indications. If you’re really interested in this subject, you should…er, no, you must visit this tutorial in gameindustry.com. The truth is it wasn’t so easy as this seven steps to have Perforce and UDK running together…

Good luck and have a nice day!