id Software, SplashDamage and Nerve Software are using Best Practical's SVK for Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars development.

30GB worth of game assets need to be synchronized between 3 companies (SplashDamage in the UK, id Software and Nerve Software in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Texas). Level designers and artists are working day to day in each site on the latest assets, making changes that need to be propagated transparently to everybody else.

We use SVK to maintain mirrors at id Software and Nerve Software of the main repository hosted in the UK. We wrote our own daemon software to automate the SVK operations, which triggers content propagation whenever a change is detected.

Our round trip for propagation to all the sites is usually under an hour, depending on network conditions and server load. The system requires little maintenance, except for resolving the occasional conflict that may occur because of a change performed in two sites at the same time.

The system has proven very reliable and we never encountered a significant loss of data or corrupt repository. We worked on several occasions with Best Practical during the design and deployment phase.

About Best Practical
Best Practical Solutions LLC are the creators of RT: Request Tracker, the leading open-source issue tracking system.

Best Practical was founded to deliver value to RT's established base of users by providing custom development and user support for RT. We are fully committed to supporting RT as an open source technology, while providing the quality development and support necessary to operations in commercial enterprises and corporations.

Best Practical was founded in October 2001 by Jesse Vincent, the author of RT. The company is located in Somerville, Massachusetts. Best Practical is an Open Source Company. More information on Best Practical can be found at www.bestpractical.com.

About Subversion
Subversion is a free/open-source version control system. Subversion manages files and directories, and the changes made to them, over time. This allows you to recover older versions of your data, or examine the history of how your data changed. In this regard, many people think of a version control system as a sort of “time machine”. More information on Subversion can be found at subversion.tigris.org.

About SVK
SVK is a decentralized version control system built with the robust Subversion filesystem. It supports repository mirroring, disconnected operation, history-sensitive merging, and integrates with other version control systems, as well as popular visual merge tools. More information on SVK can be found at svk.elixus.org.