Business

Syncing large datasets is inevitable and can potentially slow down your organisation’s entire development process. Improving those sync times enables developers to iterate more and also keeps them in the creative zone, which can lead to the creation of the best games.

P4VFS is a new feature of version control solution Helix Core that enables users to quickly sync and easily access the latest files without long wait times.

During the April 1 webinar “Accelerate Developer Velocity by Improving Sync Times,” Brent Schiestl, Perforce director of product management, viewers were able to see what the new P4VFS (Virtual File Service) can: Syncing  only what you need when you need it, cutting down on the amount of data that gets transferred, saving a development team time and keeping their hardware performing optimally, according to Perforce.

Schiestl told viewers he was “excited to show off what we’ve been doing around the topic of virtual file sync.”

Noting that his company’s product “has been around the block for a while,” he said: “We’ll give you a little background of how sync came to be and how it’s evolved over the years. Then, we’ll talk more in depth about P4VFS.”

After providing a solution overview, he provided a live demonstration, and talked about what’s coming after our initial release.”

The history of sync “started in October of 1995 [and] you might as well think back to what you were doing in 1995 … when we introduced the first version of Helix Core,” he said. “Fast forward a bunch of years and then you can see we introduced Parallel Sync in May of 2014. And, in March of 2019, which is right about when I started at Perforce, is when we had our first major conversation with a customer of ours around the topic of virtual files sync. And that happened at the Game Developer Conference” (GDC).

He recalled: “At that time, we started a prototype … where we were building out server side support. The missing component to all of this would be the client side support. We’re happy to announce that we’ve done that now.”

In 2022, again at GDC, “we sat in the audience and actually listened to one of our customers, Bungee, give a public talk on how they built P4VFS on top of Helix Core.”

He added: “Fast forward to this year, [when] it was our turn to actually be on the stage at GDC and we presented what we’re going to talk about today.”

The company will soon hold an official tech preview launch of P4VFS for Windows, he noted. “So what we’re building, to be clear, is specific to” Windows on the client side, and we’ll get into more [about] what that means, later on in this presentation.”