m_niedoba
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
I am one of the developers of Anchorpoint. We have been working on this project for some years right now, because we really like Git and think that it's totally underrated for large projects, such as game development.
Anchorpoint uses Git LFS, but tracks all binary files automatically before the staging process. It also has file locking and sparse checkout if you work on TB sized repositories.
We did a test where we had 1TB of files on a GitLab repo on AWS and could work fluently with it with sparse checkout.
We put a lot of effort on the UX. An artist can press a single "sync" button and Anchorpoint will do all the Git operations (stage, commit, pull, push) in the background.
THere are also some asset organization features included, because that's part of a game development workflow.
It would be really cool to know what you think or maybe share your experiences with Git LFS.
Why do people still use Perforce then?
I have seen many false statements about Git LFS and wanted to test how it works on a large repo. We are using a self-hosted GitLab on AWS and using latest Git features like sparse checkout and LFS (we are also contributing to the development of it) to see how far you can push Git.
We develop Anchorpoint, but everything can also be achieved with the command line app.
The test repo has 1TB (1.004 GiB) and a total file count (excluding files, that are ignored by the .gitignore) of 385.493. We are using sparse checkout to work on a subset (4GB) of the project. To make a performance test, we changed 10 files in Unreal Engine.
- “Git status” takes 1581.6007 milliseconds - “Git add . “ takes 1633.8424 milliseconds - “Git commit -m “Added bench” “ takes 1653-3998 milliseconds
Tests also included pushing single files with a size above 9GB and a single commit with 281.876 of files (approx. 300GB of size)
We have all these great productivity tools that look nice, are easy to use and work nicely in the browser. But what do they all have in common? Yes, they are bad at handling files. Everyone has files. Be it Photoshop documents, some PDFs, or any kind of media that resides on a hard drive, Dropbox, or somewhere else. It's just another silo.
What if you could use your existing web-based tools like Notion, Basecamp or Monday.com to manage your files properly. Not just upload them as attachments.
Link Your File helps you do just that. Instead of uploading a file to the web, then downloading and unzipping it, Link Your File simply creates a web link to any file that you can paste anywhere. When you click on the link, you simply open the original file from your computer. There is no need to browse and search. Imagine how many clicks you save every day.
Link Your File works on Windows and MacOS and is available as a lifetime license. Yes, no subscription.
I am also happy to answer any questions you may have.
File locking is one of the reasons why vanilla Git is not that popular in game dev. It only exists with Git LFS and it is not really easy to use or reliable.