We love Perforce!!! And the Player.

Woohoo. Plain sight has started development.

 So far the main thing to talk about is source control and general technical difficulties.

 Moving to both Unreal 5 (instead of unity, and UE4) and Perforce has been a big and difficult adjustment for the whole team.  Throughout the setup build (the basic setup for player, map, sfx/music), it felt like 1 hour was spent coding for every 4 fighting with Perforce and UE5.  Initially we had some general issues of user error, only getting-latest on one folder instead of the entire project, forgetting to add newly created files to submissions, and things of that nature that, in hindsight, could be expected of someone just getting to grips with perforce after using a simpler source control like github desktop. But then the problems got stranger. 

Ok, I've figured out how to checkout, get latest, get revision, submit, what a changelist is, I get it (he doesn't). So why aren't my Unreal Editor Changes  being added to the changelist?? perforce doesn't detect any changes if i check them out and actively edit them either. Ok, turns out i need to setup my UE5 Revision control integration. Now it sort of works. Sometimes. If I'm lucky. And about half the time it causes my unreal to go permanently unresponsive. Cool. 

Eventually through several painful learning experiences, and talking with the team, some things working for some people, and some things not, Walking people through some things, and getting walked through others, I feel like I got a pretty decent grasp on the basics, but there are still many more Mysteries  to Perforce.  

The biggest thing to get used to coming from Github is how particular Perforce is with editing permissions. Last night as we were scrambling to get the turn in done, suddenly nobody could compile their project anymore because access was denied to all of unreal binaries. Eventually I figured out I was able to check out the binaries and compile, so we passed that around and checking out  would let each person compile while checked out, but as soon as they submitted and freed them up, they could no longer compile again. We struggled with this for hours until it decided it would work just fine, and we still have no idea what caused it or what fixed it. 

That was the worst issue so far, but there have been many other little gotchas. I'm not seeing the scripts in editor-> you have to compile first.  Perforce doesn't like to detect in-editor changes to maps or blueprints -> set up the integration. The project wont build anymore because it doesn't like your bat file -> rebuild your solution.  Its still far from perfect, but the team has been slowly getting to grips with our new tools, and I can only hope that the bulk of our source control woes are behind us.  We all went through a moment of wondering if we should switch back to Unity, or  UE4 at the least, something more comfortable, but we have decided its worth the challenge to work with the tools we chose.

Aside from that I've  just been working on the player:  I got the basic movement setup last night, and today have been working on a weapon class for the base character as well as an interact ray for the player.  Here's a quick video going over that:

-Thanks for reading, Whitman w