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A comment on Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized for a large-scale game?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by blablablame on Thursday February 04, 2016 @05:40PM (#11037867)
Agreed. While a few artist keep a few _01 _02 files around, mostly as backup/undo files, my last few years in the industry, they all used some kind of version control (maybe not git, but perforce and svn with their visual tools)
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Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by dev360 on Thursday February 04, 2016 @06:24PM (#11038087)
Sounds like perforce is common when there are lots of binary files - is this mostly due to storage concerns?
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Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by vvanders on Thursday February 04, 2016 @06:30PM (#11038120)
Bunch of factors:

  - Really good binary performance(light years ahead of git).
  - Proper locking for files that can't be merged(basically everything in the art dir).
  - Proxy support for co-located teams.
Game repos can easily approach multiple TB just for the art assets. In that area Perforce is once of the few VCS that scales appropriately.
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Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by malkia on Thursday February 04, 2016 @06:43PM (#11038188)
+1. Also easy graphical interface - P4Win/P4V, and easy to understand the system of changelists. It also helps that older changelists mean things submitted in the past, newer in the future - e.g. in contrast with digest/fingerprint schemes like other systems use.
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Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by vvanders on Thursday February 04, 2016 @08:14PM (#11038685)
Yup forgot about that but a good point as well.
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Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by sytse on Thursday February 04, 2016 @07:19PM (#11038385)
Yes, perforce is really good with large binary files. Only recently Git LFS allowed for git repositories to store large binaries as well.
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Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by ido on Friday February 05, 2016 @02:29AM (#11040103)
We use git with lfs for our game. It has on occasion been a bit of a pain, however perforce is too...unfortunately there isn't a really great solution atm, just a bunch of more or less flawed ones.
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Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by baszalmstra on Friday February 05, 2016 @03:41AM (#11040308)
Can you comment on the problems you ran into with LFS?
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Re:Ask HN: How do game companies keep their files organized ... by ido on Friday February 05, 2016 @08:19AM (#11041164)
sometimes it/git would mess up for unknown reasons and people will get the text file with a pointer to the lfs-hosted asset instead of the asset itself.

Also it's very slow for small files, and the filtering is according to file extension.

So e.g. if I have some massive mp3s for (sometimes many minutes of) music but also many (100s-1000s) small ones for sound effects downloading 1000 small mp3s take a couple seconds per file even if each is only ~40kb big (normally download rate is a couple MB/sec).

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