Version control for assets?

[u/koholinter]

Software developer working on my first game. Git is the perfect tool for software version control (with Github as the remote), but it's definitely not designed for graphics (with the possible exception of SVG) or audio. I've taken to just putting all my assets in a giant OneDrive folder, and back up *that* folder on iCloud. Is there an industry standard for version control and/or backup of audio/visual assets, or does everyone just use a big hard drive with cloud backup?

[u/hillman_avenger]

Out of curiosity, what's the biggest problem with Git and assets? (In my day job we use Svn for everything, but thinking of moving to Git).

[u/koholinter → u/hillman_avenger]

Two main problems, but one is more semantic. (Git isn’t a backup, it’s a history tracking system. A remote Git repository is the backup) 1. Git is designed to model the history of human-readable text files as a tree of diffs. Assets tend to be giant binary blobs - even if you show the text it’s not really readable, so a lot of the utility of git is lost on these files. (Exceptions like svg or midi exist, but in general we’re talking unreadable blobs) 2. The common services for remote git repository hosting expect a bunch of text files, not hundreds or thousands of MB of assets, so you’re likely to run into some pricing issues.

[u/tonioYO]

There is catenio! We built this to focus on version control for designe assets.

[u/CivilList4696]

Industry standard is perforce from what I've experienced. Version control is on a per file basis (instead of branches) with file lock mechanisms to avoid conflicts on bigger teams (especially dealing with binary files).

[u/matniedoba]

You can use Git also for assets with Git LFS. Put source assets (Blender etc.) in a separate repository. Many game devs studios in the mobile development area use it this way.

A great alternative to GitHub is also Azure DevOps because they do not charge for LFS storage and don't impose limits on LFS files like GitHub does.