If you are using Perforce as an enterprise system, $500 is peanuts. Perforce can get pricey.

We used to be a Perforce shop, in my last job.

However, I continue to be amazed that Perforce survived Git. I assume its ability to handle large binaries has been what saved it.

I seem to remember an HN posting, some time ago, about a new system, aimed at creatives, and that handles big binaries. It looked fairly good, but not sure how it’s doing.

> If you are using Perforce as an enterprise system, $500 is peanuts. Perforce can get pricey.

i think it was $600/seat back when i paid attention (20+ years ago). don't remember if it was perpetual or annual.

> However, I continue to be amazed that Perforce survived Git. I assume its ability to handle large binaries has been what saved it.

yeah i think it lives on in games probably mostly through inertia. last i looked the company itself had shifted away from p4 classic to some git wrapper stuff.

i've never actually seen it but my understanding is that google's custom internal system (piper) basically is a reimplemented scalable p4+g4 wrapper.

i always thought the workspace mapping and workspace template model in p4 was pretty elegant, especially for things like embedded platforms where you could opt in and out various subtrees which made very large device trees/bsps more manageable.

also they were the first widely deployed vcs system that attempted to be efficient (server side indices for local tree state and communication with the server in deltas rather than forcing complete rescans for every operation that often involved talking to the server as each file was scanned)

>I seem to remember an HN posting, some time ago...

Was 31 days ago... and it's Epic backed rather than a sole indie dev so likely to mature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571081

> However, I continue to be amazed that Perforce survived Git. I assume its ability to handle large binaries has been what saved it.

Curiously enough, the git data model is ideal for handling large binaries. The place it crashes-and-burns is the user space.

You're probably thinking of Lore by Epic Games which was announced recently and seems to be well-received so far and natively supported by Unreal Engine

Yeah there's no good alternative Version Control right now that can handle large binaries. And for Lore from Epic Games, while it's still 2-3 years away from being suitable for Game productions to replace Perforce, there's genuine interest and excitement about using/testing it (in some cases, studios are spending tens of thousands on P4 licenses they don't really want). Lore is already used at scale in UEFN across a huge user base so the core tech behind it is solid and trusted.

Feels like a captive audience. My tiny company paid a buggy Github competitor even in 2019 and they hiked prices like crazy. They did have a brand new project that deployed multiple projects to our own VPS with zero downtime.

> However, I continue to be amazed that Perforce survived Git.

Virtually 100% of non-indie devs use Perforce.

Is Perforce good? Ehhh not really. It’s been stagnant for 15 years.

Is Git capable of meeting game dev needs? It’s not enough close. No Git LFS does not count.

Personally I think even Git is mediocre at best. But it’s all modern devs know. So there’s been very little progress towards version control that doesn’t suck. Very sad.

Hopefully Epic’s Lore is good. Low odds. But not zero! And hey at least they’re trying.

Im amazed git survived at all. Such a mess of complexity and exotic jargon to abstract away something that should be inherently simple. After 20 years I can use it with ease thanks to llms.