Github Issues With UE4 | Tech Discussion

This week and last our team had some major difficulties using GitHub for our project. We many bizzare issues from files being lost to the ether when failing to close Unreal before switching branches to Unreal become un-openable after cloning. In lueue of the many lost hours and gained headaches, I decided to write up a checklist for my team to use when working on any features.

Our project is uses a sort of hybrid feature/branch workflow with the Main banch being dedicated to milestones, a Development branch being used for primary development, and feature branches being used for separating the various modules of our project.

For your benefit, here is the checklist we use in order to avoid the numerous errors that occur between GitHub and Unreal 4:

Cloning

1. Clone the repo
2. Switch to your working branch
3. Right click on the Unreal project and generate Visual Studio files
4. Open Unreal project and Visual Studio

Working On Features

1. Close Unreal and Visual Studio
2. Pull changes
3. Fix and conflicts
4. Switch to feature branch
5. Merge Development branch into feature branch
6. Fix any conflicts
7. Implement features, commiting each step
8. Close Unreal and Visual Studio
9. Pull changes
10. Fix any conflicts
11. Switch to Development branch
12. Merge feature branch to Development branch
13. Fix any conflicts
14. Push

It's not perfect but it gets the job done. Unfortunately this workflow takes away from some of the benefits of having feature branches since we merge them on the daily before they are fully complete. The benefit, however, is that we have less complicated merges and we are always sure that the Development branch has the most recent feauters.

Author: Reilly da Silva