How do I set up Collaborative Level Design?

Hello there,

Me and a friend are currently trying to start a simple shared portfolio piece in our spare time. Is there any way to connect our editors together, so we can see the same level. It doesn’t have to update live but some way of sharing and merging uproject updates would be good. I’ve tried the Session Frontend but it seems this is for the local network as of now and I’m not sure this is what I’m looking for.

Is this implemented? Can it be done?

Thanks,
–Darrell.

Sounds like you guys are looking at doing some sort of distributed source control?

You can set up a repo on github and use git to interface with it, though git is slow working with large binaries, so watch out for that. A number of other solutions exist as well, like perforce, svn, etc.

Just know that binaries are really hard, or impossible to merge, so try and work on non-text files at separate times to avoid conflicts

For more info on Distributed Source Control - Distributed version control - Wikipedia

I’m completely new to working collaboratively.

I have very little theoretical knowledge on how SVN’s work and no practical experience at all. I’d love to be able to set one up, it sounds so useful. Is there any tutorial or documentation on getting this set up specifically with Unreal Engine 4?

Hi Axi5,

Here is a little more information to help you start learning about Source Control with UE4.

Also, another good source is to post on our forums.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/

I hope it helps. If you have any other questions feel free to ask.

Thanks, TJ

Hi TJ Ballard,

Thanks for the help I’m still having a few issues. Me and my friend finally got Github shared repositories working and we can now share our working files. However, we not can’t get the Source Control Login in UE4 to work. It keeps telling us that the “Project is not part of an SVN working copy”.

Are we doing this right?

We’re using the Github Subversion Checkout URL as the repository, I’ve also tried the local folder and we’re getting the same error.

Also, we’re doing this via the file > connect to source control method rather than through the content browser and on specifc assets.

Axi5: is it possible you’re encountering this issue?

Unfortunately no,
I’m 100% certain I’ve just done something wrong:

I’ve tried both the standard Subversion checkout URL from Github and tried appending it to link to the project file itself. It seems to recognise that the folder exists at the very least.

The documentation for UE4 so far seems to mostly talk about Perforce.

To be specific I’m new to this so I’m sure what I’m doing is wrong, in detail:
I’ve created a Github project repository to share the project with my friend. We can both commit through the Github desktop client independantly, but as far as I’m aware it checks out the project file so we can’t work together. I then use the Subversion Checkout URL Github has in the “Repository” line in the Source Control dialog. In the Source Control settings I can specify to use Subversion, I don’t have Subversions tools installed so I’m not sure if this is a necessity.

Is this wrong?

We haven’t tested using SVN as a client to a GitHub repo, so you may be seeing issues related to being the first person I know of that has done this!

As far as I can see from GitHub’s info, they only support checkout to an ‘SVN external’ that is read-only at the moment, so you cannot use GitHub as a host for collaboration using UE4’s source control integration.

If you need to collaborate remotely, there are a number of options here that provide free or low-cost hosting. If you already have a web-host, you can usually host your own SVN server there too (depending on you providers policies).

For a team size of yours, you could also use Perforce for free as well

That makes me feel somewhat smart… but a little dishearted. I can say FYI your Github repo integration doesn’t work but it sounds like it was never meant to.

As a positive, my friend got a Perforce server running so I’m going to finally be able to mark this question as answered.

Thank you very much fellas at Epic Games and Co.

This may produce the result you are looking for:

We’ve checked this out and were very tempted. But the way we feel, it’s all or nothing.

Although I slightly regret that with the way the P4 client is treating me, ignoring my connection settings for some odd reason. Thanks for the help though upvoted :slight_smile: