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Most of the above can be partially solved with good old p4 protect and a whole lot of groups.
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Apr 16, 2013 17:53
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Shalinor posted:I'm sorry, but could you all post a trigger warning before making further artist + perforce jokes? I meant engine wise like UDK. I'm sorry I forgot what your position actually is. The reason I ask is because I'm looking to start a small Oculus project too. EDIT: Give me an email if you want to talk monsterwith21faces at gmail dot com Monster w21 Faces fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Apr 16, 2013 |
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Apr 16, 2013 17:56
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devilmouse posted:Now imagine a world where your artists had to use git.  It was not a good experience. Subversion was better (lol); we used SVN for art source files at my former job, and GIT for client facing check-ins. Except that was horrible because there were a million branches and .. which one did you want asset X in? And, oh, let me update. loving MERGE CONFLICT WHAT IN THE gently caress how I do I diff my art files noooo! abort abort!! Honestly I kind of miss Perforce, compared to my experience with Git and Subversion.
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Apr 16, 2013 17:56
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as an animator i have never had any issues using p4. It took me about a week or two to learn and some very (overly) cautious checkins artists aren't all incompetent when it comes to technology 
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Apr 16, 2013 18:15
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Version controlling doesn't have to be a hard time for an artist. Heck, the engine I'm working in now has a hard-wired link to p4 that ensures every single asset that you touch (or want to touch) is version controlled; no connection to p4? No worky. That will make your artists embrace p4 pretty fast. I wouldn't be surprised to see more critical software go this sort of route, especially with the complexity of builds (and potential to break them) always going up.
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Apr 16, 2013 18:24
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Not sure how new this is, but here's a link to HackerNews/Penny Arcade report on quality of life working as in the games industry. Interesting comments section too. Is it pretty accurate on the whole? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5551771
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Apr 16, 2013 18:34
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Hazed_blue posted:Version controlling doesn't have to be a hard time for an artist. Heck, the engine I'm working in now has a hard-wired link to p4 that ensures every single asset that you touch (or want to touch) is version controlled; no connection to p4? No worky. That will make your artists embrace p4 pretty fast. I wouldn't be surprised to see more critical software go this sort of route, especially with the complexity of builds (and potential to break them) always going up. So, thats great and all, until p4 goes away for a week or two. Then its awful as hell.
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Apr 16, 2013 18:37
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Tezzeract posted:Not sure how new this is, but here's a link to HackerNews/Penny Arcade report on quality of life working as in the games industry. Interesting comments section too. There is not really an "on the whole", you have different cultures and attitudes at different companies, different publishers involved, different projects run different ways, etc. Anecdotally, I haven't had to deal with crunch time in almost two years. The OT I've worked since then has been to the tune of an extra 3-4 hours a week here and there, and only when I feel like it. To be less pedantic, yes, these are problems that exist throughout much of the industry, but there are also areas where quality of life is actually something that the studio fights for as much as quality of game. edit: I have never once been given poo poo for "not working 12 hour days." I would love nothing more than for someone to attempt this to my face, however.
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Apr 16, 2013 18:47
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Tezzeract posted:Not sure how new this is, but here's a link to HackerNews/Penny Arcade report on quality of life working as in the games industry. Interesting comments section too. I would say *generally* the article is pretty accurate. There are always exceptions both positive and negative studio to studio (even project to project). I would say the article has an overall down tone to it which isn't necessarily undue, but it's also not every studio everywhere.
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Apr 16, 2013 18:55
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:So, thats great and all, until p4 goes away for a week or two. Then its awful as hell.
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Apr 16, 2013 19:04
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Yeah, at our place we're all plugged into P4 and all of our licenses run on a similar server and such. If we're on lockdown, we just rack up pending submits and flood the build once it's lifted and let god sort em out. If P4 goes down hard or our license server craps out, it's "Oh well, let's play Left4Dead" time. Honestly, it's never been that hard to wrap my head around systems like P4 to the extent that I need to in order to work and not cause problems. Then again, I'm more technically inclined than a lot of artists so maybe I'm on the weird end of that spectrum.
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Apr 16, 2013 19:19
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Tezzeract posted:Not sure how new this is, but here's a link to HackerNews/Penny Arcade report on quality of life working as in the games industry. Interesting comments section too. "Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men" Not true. Plenty of game developers have children. They just never get to see them. (A little gallows humor for you.) But this seems pretty accurate, at least to me: quote:Things get fuzzy when I asked for a source on the five year average of industry professionals, but a 2009 quality of life survey from the IGDA showed that 80 percent of respondents had been in the industry for 10 years or less, with the most common level of experience being one to three years in the industry. 71 percent of men were childless, with a stunning 79 percent of women being childless. Obviously, it depends where you work. I know some casual game studios are closer to a traditional office environment.
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Apr 16, 2013 19:56
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mastermind2004 posted:If your P4 server is down for a couple weeks you have a serious problem. That sort of thing is where if it's a hardware issue, someone should be calling the vendor to overnight or fly someone out with parts to fix as soon as possible. Yeah thats what happened.
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Apr 16, 2013 20:03
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My theory is that the longer someone's in the industry, the less they care about the IGDA, so the results of any survey they do are going to be skewed towards people who were students in the last 3 years.
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Apr 16, 2013 20:10
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I think the best workflow improvement I've had in my time in the games industry was when Perforce introduced shelves. All that lockdown downtime instantly gone.
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Apr 16, 2013 20:18
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mastermind2004 posted:If your P4 server is down for a couple weeks you have a serious problem. That sort of thing is where if it's a hardware issue, someone should be calling the vendor to overnight or fly someone out with parts to fix as soon as possible.
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Apr 16, 2013 20:19
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FreakyZoid posted:My theory is that the longer someone's in the industry, the less they care about the IGDA, so the results of any survey they do are going to be skewed towards people who were students in the last 3 years. Skewed, yes. But I suspect that proportionally there are way more childless 20-30 year olds than there aren't. But the real point of interest is the turnover rate, because who knows if the demographics are skewed because gamers in general skew younger. (Really, someone should do a survey of the number of 35+ year olds with 10 or more years of experience in the game industry and see if it's lower than general software development or the entertainment business.) emoticon fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Apr 16, 2013 |
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Apr 16, 2013 20:20
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emoticon posted:Skewed, yes. But I suspect that proportionally there are way more childless 20-30 year olds than there aren't. But the real point of interest is the turnover rate, because who knows if the demographics are skewed because gamers in general skew younger. To be fair there's way more childless 20-30 year olds in every industry. Also the average gamer is about 30ish. It also used to be about 37 apparently. Games is still a relatively new field and especially so considering it used to be 100% pixel based. You'd be hard pressed to find older guys that adjusted to the 3d games environment from a strict 2d style. I really would like to kill the old farts who designed Battletoads.. Dear god what a horrible game. What makes it even worse is how fun the first level is so the game tricks you into thinking maybe if I just get past this bullshit there'll be another sweet level like that. Guys are probably in hiding.
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Apr 16, 2013 20:40
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emoticon posted:Skewed, yes. But I suspect that proportionally there are way more childless 20-30 year olds than there aren't. But the real point of interest is the turnover rate, because who knows if the demographics are skewed because gamers in general skew younger.
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Apr 16, 2013 20:41
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You guys don't put your artists in their own branch? 
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Apr 16, 2013 21:13
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Chasiubao posted:You guys don't put your artists in their own branch? The P4 equivalent of the kiddie table 
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Apr 16, 2013 21:22
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:The P4 equivalent of the kiddie table  No you see, it's so that you can exercise your creative freedom. A sandbox, if you will 
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Apr 16, 2013 21:24
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At Relic when I joined it I believe the 80 people working there had 2 children combined. The last summer party we had the staff was at 180-190, and the vast majority were married, many of us having kids, with a total count of at least 100 children. They had to start hiring children's entertainers to make the events entertaining enough. That was 7 years later. The experienced staff are growing up, and the experienced staff have children. The startups may be different, but I suspect every long established video game developer has been through the same thing. Work/life balance is always a topic in every company. My job is unpredictable, and more than once has had me fly around the world on short notice for a 5-6 day trip, leaving my wife & kids behind. I've structured things so this is possible from time to time, and overall I have a fair amount of flexibility. Most game developers in the production teams at the companies I've worked at have flexible work hours for the majority of the year, and a few times where the heat is on and we need to make a deadline. Granted, I've never used OT as a solution to a "we failed to measure scope" problem, but instead as a voluntary "Let's make this as good as you want it" tool. My experience with developers is the people who find the time for both extreme hours AND time to enjoy life outside of work/minimize their working hours (depending on project phases) were the longest lasting in the industry, and the guys who complained about a 44 hour week the two weeks we asked for it weren't actually that great.
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Apr 16, 2013 21:25
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Man, at my last studio if P4 went down for more than like 5 minutes everyone started freaking out.
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Apr 16, 2013 21:29
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Chasiubao posted:You guys don't put your artists in their own branch? At the old place, each department on a game was in their own branch, along with a branch for each release / feature. All hail the might of DVCS! At the older place, artists all had to go through the central gatekeeper before they were allowed to check anything in to the trunk. Individual headaches, but no broken builds!
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Apr 16, 2013 21:30
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I swear we used to have someone from the animation team(always animation, but always a different guy!) check out the entirety of Perforce on a weekly basis for a while. It'd take an absolute age to fix and was a huge hassle for the coders, but us modellers mostly don't mind if Perforce gets locked up for a while. We've got a whole bunch of Maya scripts and tools that integrate into P4 and make life simpler for dumbass artists(and dumbass Maya) but sometimes, poo poo just happens... I like having version control. It's a drat sight better than my brief stint on Unity projects when we were IMing links to packages back and forth as we worked. That was... not a great way to collaborate, really. [edit] Also, it's a great way to identify who's been making stupid loving decisions when you have to revert stuff back to a last good version. Collapsed all my layers in a PSD cause you don't know how to work with layer styles? I am going to look that up in P4, revert it, and find you, and make you regret it. floofyscorp fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Apr 16, 2013 |
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Apr 16, 2013 21:31
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:Its always funnier when its real All of my quotes are sourced (exaggerated slightly for comedic effect) from real artists. The month-long "I have spun off my own local branch" bit was only discovered when the guy had a hard drive crash wherein he lost data. Whoops. FreakyZoid posted:My theory is that the longer someone's in the industry, the less they care about the IGDA, so the results of any survey they do are going to be skewed towards people who were students in the last 3 years. I joined the IDGA to go to their mixer at my first GDC, drank my two drink ticket drinks, wore the T-Shirt, and decided later on that I had spent far too much for drinks. I'm still not sure what they do. I think part of it may be that I'm anti-social and don't really want to schmooze with people who schmooze all the time, combined with the prevalence of students. I grow increasingly un-interested in talking with students and hopefuls as I get older - I keep saying the same things and they keep growing new kids who don't know what's up. It might sound selfish or callow but I have dispensed so much information to so many people that I find it harder and harder to find the time to provide that kind of guidance. It used to be validating, now it is exhausting.
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Apr 16, 2013 21:42
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Sigma-X posted:All of my quotes are sourced (exaggerated slightly for comedic effect) from real artists. The month-long "I have spun off my own local branch" bit was only discovered when the guy had a hard drive crash wherein he lost data. Whoops. Oh jesus, I don't think we've had anything that bad, but I've definately got 10 or so angry emails from out west whenever somethings broken. Sigma-X posted:I grow increasingly un-interested in talking with students and hopefuls as I get older - I keep saying the same things and they keep growing new kids who don't know what's up. It might sound selfish or callow but I have dispensed so much information to so many people that I find it harder and harder to find the time to provide that kind of guidance. It used to be validating, now it is exhausting. I know I'll eventually get this way as well, but as long as one of the people I help takes over and does the same for new people, I'll consider it worth it. If I can keep that cycle going I'll be happy.
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Apr 16, 2013 21:48
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Sigma-X posted:I joined the IDGA to go to their mixer at my first GDC, drank my two drink ticket drinks, wore the T-Shirt, and decided later on that I had spent far too much for drinks. I'm still not sure what they do. I think part of it may be that I'm anti-social and don't really want to schmooze with people who schmooze all the time, combined with the prevalence of students. Sigma-X posted:I grow increasingly un-interested in talking with students and hopefuls as I get older - I keep saying the same things and they keep growing new kids who don't know what's up. It might sound selfish or callow but I have dispensed so much information to so many people that I find it harder and harder to find the time to provide that kind of guidance. It used to be validating, now it is exhausting.
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Apr 16, 2013 21:56
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The following is a true story
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Apr 16, 2013 22:15
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Perforce? P4? Git? Despite being in industry a year and five months now I do hope I'm not the only person who has never heard of these. :B I've used TortoiseSVN at my last job if that counts. Then again I seem to gravitate towards smaller companies made up of dudes in their 40s and very few young people so I'm the ultimate exception to this thread. 
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Apr 16, 2013 22:20
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Sigma-X posted:I grow increasingly un-interested in talking with students and hopefuls as I get older - I keep saying the same things and they keep growing new kids who don't know what's up. It might sound selfish or callow but I have dispensed so much information to so many people that I find it harder and harder to find the time to provide that kind of guidance. It used to be validating, now it is exhausting. You are a bad person.   I can basically always answer questions for students, because I just think, God, wouldn't I have loved it if someone took the time for me that I'm taking for them back when I was coming up.
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Apr 16, 2013 22:27
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Regarding providing advice to folks, I'm kind of in between the "I find it exhausting" and "I wish someone would have been able to provide insight into how to break into the industry when I had a post-college ad agency job". Basically I give everyone who wants advice the opportunity to seek it and provide feedback/support as merited by their response. I have gotten a number of resumes/cover letters from people and provided initial feedback only to receive a "ok now can you introduce me to someone who can get me a job" response. The answer to this question is usually "no", but I'm in semi-regular communication with a couple of entry level type people and I do stuff like help them apply for jobs (in the form of cover letter help) or prep for interviews by doing mock phone interviews with them etc. So I guess I'm in the "I'm happy to help but only if you're willing to help yourself as well" camp.
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Apr 16, 2013 22:39
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Sigma-X posted:I keep saying the same things and they keep growing new kids who don't know what's up. It might sound selfish or callow but I have dispensed so much information to so many people that I find it harder and harder to find the time to provide that kind of guidance. It used to be validating, now it is exhausting. Whenever I get asked questions, assuming it's for programming, I tell them that ultimately at the end of the day they are writing software, and should approach it as such rather than doing whatever 'just works' (I then say VALVe does this, and hey don't you want to work at VALVe you bright-eyed naive student?). I tell them if they want a leg up on the competition because they don't feel comfortable with their own skills, they should learn what stuff like a VCS is, as well as their tools. Maybe they don't need to do some bizarre weird TTF to OTF hack if a tool they are using already supports. If there is one goal I have while in this industry, it will be to totes gnarls
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Apr 16, 2013 22:57
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Aliginge posted:Perforce? P4? Git? I am intimately familiar with git, but I've never heard of those others!! 
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Apr 16, 2013 23:01
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Aliginge posted:Perforce? P4? Git?
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Apr 16, 2013 23:08
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I remember being resistant to using them at first, but I have to say, at some point shelves changed my life.
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Apr 17, 2013 00:20
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Akuma posted:You wouldn't like Perforce/P4. I have to use it now. I don't like Perforce. I miss SVN. Do you use perforce in your house? Do you use perforce with a mouse? I do not use it in my house. I do not use it with a mouse. I do not like it here or there. I do like git, when it is everywhere. waffledoodle posted:I remember being resistant to using them at first, but I have to say, at some point shelves changed my life. Git has the stash command as the P4 shelve equivalent and it is so drat useful.
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Apr 17, 2013 00:28
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Perforce is pretty good so long as you replace p4merge with a competent diff tool like beyond compare 3. I'd choose it over what we were using before (cvs) in a microsecond. I think when we moved over to perforce from cvs, we left the artists in cvs for, like, a year before we moved them over to what everyone else was using.
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Apr 17, 2013 00:39
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i've only used p4 (first p4win then moved over to p4v) for the last couple years and have never encountered any of these horror stories, especially in regards to artists. In fact the one time someone accidentally checked out an entire directory it was one of the engineers. That said shelving is amazing and streams are fantastic and have essentially eliminated submission lockdowns.
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Apr 17, 2013 01:21
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