How to collaborate?

Hi all,

I recently did a small 2 hour jam with Excal. It went well enough, but was extremely messy having to re-add variables and families to the main project (we were using a main capx that we would load, apply changes to, then save).

Since then, I tried saving as a project in Copy (like dropbox), open two copies of the same game, add different event sheets and families to each then save them one after another. While all the event sheets appeared in the 'event sheet' folder, when I open the game again it only contains the ones from the last save. Variables and families also only appeared if they were form the last save.

Does anyone have some advice? I tried looking through the forums as I'm sure I have seen something about this before, but kept getting nothing in the searches.

First, you should be saving your project as a caproj, not a capx. Caproj allows you to edit an "open" project, with all its animations and event sheets laid out inside a folder, instead of being bound up in a single file.

This way you can freely edit, load up and adjust sprites while another person works on an event sheet, and I think you can work on two separate event sheets at the same time, since these are stored as separate xml files. This way you could, for example, have one person working on the main events of a game while another person builds new levels that each have their own simplified event sheets and call in the main sheet.

I anyone else has any tips on this I'd also love to hear them. I'm gearing up to work with a colleague for Ludum Dare 26.

GeometriX - Yeah I gave that a try afterwards, but like I was saying the caproj would still only load the latest project save and event sheets added by previous saves would not appear (even though they were in the project folder).

Have you (or anyone else here) actually tried it before?

Oh, sh*t just tried it now. Experienced exactly what you said. Yeah, it's pretty unworkable like this :/

Is this a bug do you think? In the manual it tells you to use projects for collaboration, and it half works, so I'd just like to know if anyone has had this working in the past.

Tobye - I think it has more to do with how Dropbox syncs then anything else. I know I've had problems just leaving a file open on one computer and it not syncing changes I made on another.

I haven't attempted collaborating with C2 yet, but it's been mentioned a few times before. It seems like the general consensus is to use some sort of source management service - somebody mentioned BitBucket a while back - it's free for up to 5 users and might be worth looking into.

rogueNoodle - I was on Copy, not sure about Geometrix though. But also I was doing all this on my desktop too, so I don't think syncing could be an issue.

Thanks for that, I have been looking through it, but so far it only talks of code. In the setup for example it asks you to add your source code - and that stuff is beyond me. I will keep looking into it, but did these other posts mention anything about it?

Tobye - honestly, the source management stuff hurts my head :P   You can probably get some clearer answers searching through the forums for Git or SVN (and BitBucket as well). There's probably some good back and forth in the threads that turn up.

Having said that, I just took a look through the forums and it seems like adding an event sheet to a project and having it show up isn't really supported. A few threads mention manually merging projects by opening up both versions side by side and copying objects and then events from one to the other. That would be a little time-consuming and error prone though...

Sorry I can't be much help :P

Ashley has mentioned that C2 will not provide it's own Concurrent Versioning System(CVS). Instead you will need to use another system for such activities. I think a suggestion was DropBox, but maybe Bitbucket or some form of file driven GitHub maybe.

rogueNoodle - Alrighty, thanks for the lead at least! I'll try to find something. And yeah that's what we were doing before, and really it is a nightmare! Especially since you can't copy over dictionaries or families! It means remaking all the variable etc. every time you want to add something.

...and some time later I got stuck here:

confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Clone+Your+Git+Repo+and+Add+Source+Files

I have no idea about terminal windows or anything. Anyone able to help me out here?