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I'm part of a small team (usually just two people), I handle the code, he handles the graphic design. In the past I've used CVS to handle version control of the code files, and while we've included the graphics in the repository, he hasn't derived nearly as much value from it as I have.

Are there other packages that provide the better features for supporting graphics? The system would need to have an easy to use GUI interface, as I don't think it's fair to expect a graphic designer to learn command-line tools.

Additional aspect: The client software needs to run smoothly on OS X (for the designer), and Windows (for the programmer).

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Do you need a windows based solution? –  Christoph Schiessl Oct 9 '08 at 17:12
Windows and Mac. –  acrosman Oct 10 '08 at 3:09

7 Answers 7

up vote 4 down vote accepted

SVN; it's a successor to CVS. SVN supports versioning on binary files.

SmartSVN is a nice client for the graphic designer.

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Nice reference to SmartSVN. I had never come across that tool before, but looks great. –  Ben Hoffstein Oct 9 '08 at 17:15
@BEN: SmartSVN is java; I like it for providing a constant interface across the multiple platforms I work with. –  Paul Nathan Oct 9 '08 at 17:23

I would recommend Subversion with TortoiseSVN. It integrates into Windows Explorer and allows you to do everything you need from the context menu (update, commit, branch, merge... anything). It can handle all kinds of files, and best of all, both Subversion and TortoiseSVN are free (along with the other SVN tools).

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Perforce and P4V should work fine. You could also use the P4EXP extension that lets someone submit, add to repository, etc just by right clicking in a straight Windows file explorer window. For many artists this is sufficient for most of they day to day operations and is deeply familiar. More esoteric and less frequent source control functions can be accessed through the P4V client.

Note that P4V also provides thumbnail views automatically that will help artists a lot. You can write your own plugin if you have your own formats - either client side or server side.

Yet another alternative is the P4Web interface that lets you do a lot of things conveniently through a web browser.

Perforce have put a lot of effort in over the last few years to target artist workflows, which is one of the reasons they've made so much inroads into the games development industry.

(No I don't work for them!)

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Perforce also has a nice image diff tool to show changes between revisions of a file. Also the latest version allows you to customize and strip down the P4V UI to reduce the complexity for non power users –  Fraser Graham Mar 29 '10 at 2:31

TortoiseSVN + Subversion should do the job. I've never had to use it, but TortoiseSVN comes with TortoiseIDiff which lets you compare images.

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I would recommend Subversion, which natively supports binary files (and binary diffs). For the GUI interface, you can use TortoiseSVN, which is as good as it gets.

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Subversion, Tortoise SVN. It has easy interface, and that is importrant when hiring new artists which are not necessery had experience working with subversion before. Basicaly you just need to know two buttons to start working.

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If you would like a GIT style version control system, with an easy GUI, I would use Tortoise HG (which uses Mercurial distributed version control system, and almost the exact same styled interface system as Tortoise SVN). It's written in Python, and you can use it to connect with BitBucket (which is basically a slightly different clone of GitHub in Django.

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