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Published: Sproing Selects Perforce to Manage Game Development
Powerful version control and low administrative cost cited as principal criteria
Wokingham, UK., 5 September, 2006 - Perforce Software today announced that Austrian game developer, Sproing Interactive Media GmbH, has selected Perforce, the Fast Software Configuration Management (SCM) System, to manage the development of its games. Perforce, the award-winning SCM system, tracks and manages the changes made to source code, documents, and digital assets in software and game development environments.
Sproing Interactive, based in Vienna, specializes in the development of games on all major entertainment platforms. Its customers include large publishers and games vendors. Sproing uses Perforce SCM to archive every item that goes into its PC and console game projects, allowing developers to recreate an entire game at any stage of its development. Game elements include the source code of the game itself as well as supporting tools and utilities, technical design documents, project plans and all the source material for in-game assets such as 2D images, 3D models, audio files and proprietary files.
"The determining factor for selecting Perforce is its version control functionality, whilst maintaining an at-a-glance overview of all development activity within a project," said Gerhard Seiler, Sproing's co-founder and technical director. "The changelists are a good tool for our project managers to control the progress of asset creation as well as feature creation."
Within the Perforce SCM system, a 'changelist' is a collection of related changes that can be grouped together and submitted as a single transaction. This is an "all or nothing" operation that guarantees the underlying repository is in a consistent state and that all changes can be selectively retrieved or propagated to different codelines.
Choosing an SCM system
Sproing required an SCM system that could manage the large volumes of data used by their games' graphics and 3D models. Prior to selecting Perforce, Sproing evaluated several SCM products including open source systems. During the initial review phase, however, open source products such as CVS were eliminated because they were unable to cope with large files, did not adequately protect against data loss, nor did they offer personalized customer support. Other commercial SCM systems they considered were either disproportionately expensive or too complex to administer.
"Perforce Software's SCM system requires close to zero administration", said Seiler. "Perforce's version control also helps us to ensure all developers are working with the same data. This is crucial in game development as a typical project consists of tens of thousands of individual source files, code, graphics, sound, etc. and every developer in the team needs access to this. The same goes for different versions (branches) of the game, every developer has to be able to easily get the full consistent data."
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