[Request] Perforce Integration Feature Request

Greetings,

I’ve been inquiring about features and workflow for the integrated source control manager before (https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/31090/integrated-scm-feature-set.html). After we were re-evaluating it after the recent version update, we’ve come up with a number of missing features, which are crucial in our optimal workflow.

Additionally we encountered a workflow breaking… i don’t wanna call it bug… let’s say occurance:

A checks out a material, changes and submits it. Meanwhile, B starts to work on the same material without checking it out, wants to save, cant save it because he needs to check it out. It cannot be checked out because he’s not synced. Then you’re stuck and the only solution we’ve found thus far is to restart the editor, resulting in the loss of your work.

To prevent things like that from happening there are a number of features we’d very much like to see, and i’d imagine a lot of developers would make good use of it aswell.

  1. Automatic update of a file’s status.
    Manually refreshing a file to see if it is currently locked or outdated is not all that helpful.

  2. Automatic Checkout
    Since you’re working in a source controlled environment there is never a situation where you’re going to make a change only locally. It is more than likely that you are going to submit your work after you’re done. We’d love to see a prompt (checkout? y/n) when you attempt to edit assets which aren’t checked out. Especially since you can easily open assets from outside the content browser.

  3. Submission history/Depot info
    Currently you have to manually check for updates on certain assets (see 1.). It would be awesome to have a depot submission label on the titlebar, showing the latest revision number and submission text. Or alternatively having the SCM icon showing a number of submissions we’re currently behind, so we can sync directly to the head (or optimally any) revision for instance (see 4.).

  4. Directory syncing
    In the above mentioned thread it was said that the syncing feature has been expanded to support directories or entire projects. Currently we’re failing to find that option. Is it not built in to the public release yet? We’d rather love to use it.

  5. Content Browser directory overlays
    A nice cherry on top would be an overlay on foldersin the Content Browser which include outdated assets, so we can update our files accordingly and dont have to worry to stay behind or unnecessarily wait for someone else to finish his work on a certain asset.

These features would help a lot regarding the general workflow, make the use of P4V almost abundant aswell and having fewer points of potential errors or conflicts.

We’d love to hear your input on this.

Thanks for reading!

wzl