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unsignedqword | 9 years ago

Many companies in the games industry have settled on using Perforce or SVN (or more recently Plastic DVCS) internally as, out of the box, it can handle both code and non-code assets (i.e. large binary files) well in tandem. Git has problems with the latter - people have tried to correct this with solutions like git-annex and git-LFS but these have failed to catch on thus far.

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kirushik|9 years ago

The problem with non-code assets in git is (or at least it was for us) not with such assets being large blobs with weird in-git storage model, but with such assets being _unmergeable_ in case of two parallel edits of the same object.

Since merges are not generally possible (except for some special usecases), one would expect version-control system's help in avoiding parallel edit situation at all. This is where svn's centralized server helps, allowing "pessimistic locking" of certain files and folders. AFAIK, Plastic also offers such a feature, when git cannot do anything like that by design.

rmc|9 years ago

> The problem with non-code assets in git is (or at least it was for us) not with such assets being large blobs with weird in-git storage model, but with such assets being _unmergeable_ in case of two parallel edits of the same object.

I tried storing large images in git once. And one problem was when git would try to do garbage collection every now and then. And start diffing all the images against each other to repack them to use less space. This was very CPU and memory intensive.

BinaryIdiot|9 years ago

I was wondering about this as well. I haven't done much video game dev in the past few years but even in my little indie stuff trying to check files into Git was a bit rough at times. Doable but on a very small scale. I'm surprised Git hasn't been adapted to handle this more natively but I'm curious if there are any trends or directions people are heading in regarding this or if they're still sticking with SVN.

INTPenis|9 years ago

True and as if perforce didn't have enough of a strangle hold on the industry, it's free for small studios under 20 users I believe. So that would include most indie developers.