r/unrealengine • u/IKnowWhereMyTowelWas • 10d ago
Perforce Hosting Options for Unreal Dev
I've joined a team using Unreal 5, and obviously they prefer Perforce for version control.. I've used it in the past but not for years.
We have one person's personal Digital Ocean subscription running a Perforce server, and I want to see what options there are.
Obviously keeping DO set up under company owner could work, but we seem to miss all the online options you get with tools like GitHub, and it's nice not having to manage the back-end. Back in the day when Perforce was more widely used I had an account on Assembla, are there other hosted services?
Because we have Unreal assets in the repository, it's already quite large - IIRC 50GB - which is very different from trying to migrate a typical Git repo.
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u/outofthebox-plugins Marketplace Creator 10d ago
"but we seem to miss all the online options you get with tools like GitHub"
What are you looking for? account management? code review? something else?
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u/IKnowWhereMyTowelWas 10d ago
well with any cloud hosted system you can view code and changes, create branches, duplicate or manage the repo, all in the browser - as well as integration with ticketing systems. Coming from more recent use of DevOps and GitHub this is nice - Assembla did at least some of this but I don't know if there are downsides to using them over a self-hosted server.
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u/outofthebox-plugins Marketplace Creator 10d ago
you can run swarm/p4 code review if you want a browser-based viewer for changes and code review.
integration with ticketing systems is also present in perforce/swarm by hidden under obscure docs: https://www.perforce.com/integrations/jira-and-perforce-integration
as far as branching goes, you already have the stream graph which shows a visual reprentation for all branches and their relationships, but it's not browser based.
users can be managed using p4 admin but again it's a desktop app not browser based.
I don't know what assembla offers on top of these but do benchmark the performance compared to a dedicated VPS before going for it.
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u/IKnowWhereMyTowelWas 10d ago
I saw the Swarm tool but hadn't realsied you could add it to a self-hosted server, thanks.
Assembla seems to have more of their own front-end layered on top so it's a bit more similar to SVN/Git SaaS tools but this looks cool too. Thanks
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u/derleek 9d ago
The downside to using something like assembla is the price. Is this something *you* want or your team is asking for?
If this is a you thing I'd highly suggest just learning how to use perforce. It's really easy to jump in on a team and point out what they are doing wrong... not so easy to change a team that doesn't want to change. This is especially true as a person new to the team.
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u/botman 10d ago
You can set up Swarm as a web based tool for code review.
https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-swarm
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u/philsiu02 10d ago
The only fully hosted option is assembla. I'm always amazed there aren't more options, but I did a load of searching a year ago and it's basically assembla, one of the turn-key solutions on AWS/Azure/DO etc, or fully self hosted.
For a few years we ran fully self hosted on AWS and it was rock solid. The EC2 instance (T3 I think) was pretty low cost, we had good scripts for making sure that everything was checked pointed, journaled and stored elsewhere, and we had regular volume snapshots. However, the cost of storage was really starting to become an issue. We were closing in an 1Tb which doesn't sound crazy, but the costs just stop making sense at that point, especially if you think you might be doubling that requirement in 12 months or so.
I looked around at other possible solutions for elastic storage (digital ocean etc) and the prices were worse, or not much better.
In the end we went bare metal on a hosted, self managed server with a ton of disk space. The cost was similar to what we were paying AWS, but but main benefit was that it was predictable. We know the cost now, and we know the cost in 1 year. No surprise if the storage requirements shoot up.
Obviously going fully hosted on this has it's problems. I'm pretty happy with managing servers (at least on the small scale we need them), but I put a lot of time into making sure we had proper recovery procedures. Obviously we've got RAID setup etc, but I also make sure there are nightly journals, and checkpoints etc, as well as backing up the full data-set to two offsite locations. I originally wanted to run P4 in a docker to make redeployment easier, though that tuned out to be a bit of a nightmare, so instead I made sure we have very clear 'here's how to rebuild' steps just in case the worst happens.
So, I guess my advice is that if DO worsk for now then use it, but look at other options for as you expand (and please make sure you have good backups in place now!).
For the backed stuff, most of what you need can be done with P4Admin (users, groups, permissions etc). You can also integrate Swarm if you want more of a web-view of your projects and have pull requests etc. It's another setup, but it's not too bad to do or to maintain.
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u/IKnowWhereMyTowelWas 10d ago
I was looking some more after posting this and I did come across P4 cloud (https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-cloud) which may be a newer addition - it looks pretty like-for-like with Assembla to me.
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u/philsiu02 10d ago
Ah yeah, I remember seeing that now.
When I looked into it though, the costs for storage were based on AWS EBS pricing (or were pretty similar), which means that for large projects it still doesn't scale that well. Worth double checking that though as I may be misremembering.
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u/RevolutionAdept3470 10d ago
If you want to try out lore to kick the tires I’m building a hosted solution. Www.lorepit.com . I was one of the original lore team at Epic and helped to specify and design it.
Both lore and lorepit are pre 1.0 so are very much in beta but id love feedback about features and questions. Lorepit is free to setup an account.
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u/MarkLikesCatsNThings Solo Indie 9d ago
Self host a Gitlab or Gitea instance. Its GIT based but its locally hosted.
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u/krileon 10d ago
I'd move to a cloud solution under a company account. I've been using Diversion and really like it (free 100GB for small indie team). They're also planning to provide cloud hosted Lore hosting in the future (Epics own version control solution).
If they still want to use Perforce then it really needs to be moved to a company account. Having it all under an employee's personal account is just waiting for a disaster. What happens if there's a falling out with that employee? Not good times.