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Use Unreal Revision Control to Improve Collaboration in UEFN
The Fortnite Team
You’re adding the final touches to your island. Then pop — a glitch in the matrix and all your progress from the last few hours disappears.
What happened?
Someone on your team has accidentally overwritten your work. If this sounds frustratingly familiar, it’s time you implemented Unreal Revision Control (URC) — one of the most important UEFN tools at your disposal when working as part of a team.
Revision control might not sound glamorous, but it can be a lifesaver. Beyond preventing your hard work from being lost, revision control makes collaboration more efficient and helps you release versions faster by shortening production time.
URC constantly updates your project environment in real time so that everybody is developing on the latest version of the island. It also ensures that only one team member at a time is making changes to any asset, eliminating the possibility of teammates accidentally overwriting each other's work, or wasting time by inadvertently working on the same thing.
To get started, select the “Unreal Revision Control” box when creating a new project. When you turn this option on, UEFN will take a snapshot of your island and its assets. That snapshot will constantly update by synchronizing changes made by anyone working on the island.
URC automatically reviews assets that you move or edit, so go ahead and work on whatever you need to. When you start to move or edit an asset, URC locks the asset to you, preventing other team members from making changes while you’re using it.
If you try to make changes to an asset someone else is using, those edits are not applied and you’ll receive a pop-up letting you know that someone else is editing that asset. This functionality saves you from putting in hours of work on an asset only to realize that those changes won’t be applied.
In order to ensure you’re always working on the most up-to-date version of the project, you’ll need to keep everybody’s edits in sync. UEFN will let you know when changes have been made that need to be synced by displaying the “Sync Latest” button. Make sure to select that button whenever you see it as a clickable option so everybody is on the same page.
Another component of URC is checking in your own edits. When you make changes that need to be checked in, you’ll see a button that switches from “No Changes” to “Check-in Changes.” Keep an eye on this as you’re working and make sure to select “Check-in Changes” when it’s available to you.
Check out our Snapshot History and Conflict Resolution documentation for more info!
If and when teammates get into conflict, the Conflict Resolution tool provides a visual, data-rich, and interactive interface for choosing which version of an asset you’d like to move forward with.
When you press the “Sync Latest” button, you’ll be notified with a pop-up message about any conflicts that have been created. Clicking “Review Conflicts” will open the Conflict Resolution tool.
From here, you can resolve the conflict by choosing whether to save the snapshot of your changes or the snapshot of your teammate’s changes.
Resolving conflicts like this means you can quickly and easily move your project forward. For more details, see the Snapshot History and Conflict Resolution documentation.
To find out how to set up Unreal Revision Control for your own projects, head over to our Unreal Revision Control documentation.
What happened?
Someone on your team has accidentally overwritten your work. If this sounds frustratingly familiar, it’s time you implemented Unreal Revision Control (URC) — one of the most important UEFN tools at your disposal when working as part of a team.
Revision control might not sound glamorous, but it can be a lifesaver. Beyond preventing your hard work from being lost, revision control makes collaboration more efficient and helps you release versions faster by shortening production time.
Avoid Accidentally Overwriting Work
At its heart, Unreal Revision Control is all about the effective management of your project, particularly when working with others.URC constantly updates your project environment in real time so that everybody is developing on the latest version of the island. It also ensures that only one team member at a time is making changes to any asset, eliminating the possibility of teammates accidentally overwriting each other's work, or wasting time by inadvertently working on the same thing.
To get started, select the “Unreal Revision Control” box when creating a new project. When you turn this option on, UEFN will take a snapshot of your island and its assets. That snapshot will constantly update by synchronizing changes made by anyone working on the island.
URC automatically reviews assets that you move or edit, so go ahead and work on whatever you need to. When you start to move or edit an asset, URC locks the asset to you, preventing other team members from making changes while you’re using it.
If you try to make changes to an asset someone else is using, those edits are not applied and you’ll receive a pop-up letting you know that someone else is editing that asset. This functionality saves you from putting in hours of work on an asset only to realize that those changes won’t be applied.
In order to ensure you’re always working on the most up-to-date version of the project, you’ll need to keep everybody’s edits in sync. UEFN will let you know when changes have been made that need to be synced by displaying the “Sync Latest” button. Make sure to select that button whenever you see it as a clickable option so everybody is on the same page.
Another component of URC is checking in your own edits. When you make changes that need to be checked in, you’ll see a button that switches from “No Changes” to “Check-in Changes.” Keep an eye on this as you’re working and make sure to select “Check-in Changes” when it’s available to you.
Snapshot History
Let’s go back to snapshots. You can review a project’s snapshot history to find out important snapshot information, filter snapshots by date, and view any assets in your projects that have conflicts. You can also restore an earlier snapshot from the history list and continue working from that version of the project.Check out our Snapshot History and Conflict Resolution documentation for more info!
Conflict Resolution Tool
Unreal Revision Control now features a more effective way of managing conflicts in your project. Conflicts can happen for different reasons, but the most common is that one teammate makes changes offline to the same part of a project that another teammate has since submitted changes on.If and when teammates get into conflict, the Conflict Resolution tool provides a visual, data-rich, and interactive interface for choosing which version of an asset you’d like to move forward with.
When you press the “Sync Latest” button, you’ll be notified with a pop-up message about any conflicts that have been created. Clicking “Review Conflicts” will open the Conflict Resolution tool.
From here, you can resolve the conflict by choosing whether to save the snapshot of your changes or the snapshot of your teammate’s changes.
Resolving conflicts like this means you can quickly and easily move your project forward. For more details, see the Snapshot History and Conflict Resolution documentation.
Explore Unreal Revision Control
As we’ve demonstrated, the Unreal Revision Control feature is a useful safety net that can help prevent your hard work being erased. As such, it should be a standard part of your process when working on projects with UEFN.To find out how to set up Unreal Revision Control for your own projects, head over to our Unreal Revision Control documentation.