Big Game Project – Production Week 1

Source Control

Starting this new project up we needed to have a way to distribute the project between all the group members. The way we decided to handle the source control landed on using SVN.

The idea of source control is to enable multiple persons to work on the same project without risking to overwrite work created from the other members. The first attempt to get a working source control was with the use of Git. Git is a well known source control for code and documents. When it came to working with Git in unreal it was still under the Beta stage of development but it could still be operated.

Using git we ran into the problem where the repositories that were available had limits on repository sizes. It didn’t take long until we hit the 2 GB cap for the repository and were forced to migrate our source control into something more stable.

The new solution became the use of Subversion, also known as SVN. SVN has integrated with unity and many of the tasks needed of a source control was within reach from inside the engine itself.

In order to get a working SVN without risk for hitting any form of restriction I setup a local SVN server on the local network. The SVN server worked flawless for me and for the rest of the group at first, then the problem of losing connectivity came up and we were forced to upgrade the local network with a router of our own that we had full control and could let the server through without firewalls interrupting.

The way SVN was integrated in Unreal made it so that you check out the files you are working with, by doing so others get prompted that these files are locked by the other member. This prevents files from being overwritten. 

Having the SVN server on a local machine also came with the bonus of incredible sync speed compared to the earlier Git Source Control we were using.