Perforce and UE How To - GUI (p4v)

Author
Affiliation

Prof. Dr. Flip Phillips

Rochester Institute of Technology, MAGIC, MPS, CIS

How to Check Out your Perforce Helix Project

Platforms

The p4v GUI client is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It provides a user-friendly interface for managing your Perforce Helix projects and is mostly the same across platforms.

Step 1: Install the Perforce Client

  1. Install the Client:

Go to https://www.perforce.com/downloads, download and install the P4 Visual Client (P4V).

  1. Configure the Client
Figure 1: Run the p4v client. This is the icon.
Figure 2: For the first run, you need to specify our server address. It is ssl:mss-perforce-01.rit.edu:1666. (Make sure you get the whole ‘colon’ thing right. Dashes and numerical 0, no spaces.) Next your user. It is your RIT user without any @rit.... Leave the workspace blank for now. We just want to get logged in.
Figure 3: Note that, Fall 2025, you will need to use a custom password instead of your RIT password.
Security

p4 is running on a secure connection (SSL) by default. When you first start p4v it will ask you to confirm some certificates. Go ahead and accept them. (TODO: put the screenshots and hashes here.)

GUI and CLI

The GUI client plays ‘ok’ with the command line interface (CLI) client. The settings are mostly shared but not always, so be prepared for weirdness if you use both.

Congratulations! You’re in.

Step 2: Create a Workspace

  1. The Main Window:
Figure 4: The Workspace window. (1) Your server and username. (2) Current path in depot or workspace. (3) Workspace (your computer) vs Depot (Perforce server) selector. (4) The things you have access to - your workspace view if you have any, or the depot paths you can access.
  1. Create the Workspace:
Figure 5: While in Workspace mode, click the popdown menu and select New Workspace....

There are 5 things we need to configure in this dialog:

Figure 6: Note the items numbered 1-5. We need to change those.

Change:

  1. A name for your workspace. I use something simple like laptop_vp because I don’t work on very many machines. You can see that the default has the username, machine name, and a unique identifier. You can be simpler.

  2. Workspace root gets set automatically. Unless you have another reason (like, say putting it on a remote drive) you can leave it the way it is.

  3. You need to right-click and Clear the default mapping from playpen.

  4. You can right click on the vp25-ue depot and select Include Tree and you get everything under that depot. If that’s too much, you can just Include specific folders for your project.

  5. If you click this, it will download everything so you don’t need to do an initial sync. Your choice. Sometimes it throws an error that it couldn’t create the workspace if this is checked.

Figure 7: Things to delete and things to include.

If you have Automatically get all revisions checked, when you click OK it will download the project.

Otherwise, you can click on the Refresh and Get Latest buttons in the top of the Workspace window to download the project.

As the sync is in process you’ll see a dialog box. Also, the log tab will show you what is happening.

Figure 8: The log tab shows you what is happening. You can see the files being downloaded and any errors that might occur.
Warning

WIP

UE

Unreal Engine has built-in support for Perforce. This means that you can use Perforce from within Unreal to manage your project. This is a powerful feature, as it allows you to manage your project without leaving the Unreal environment.

Alas, sometimes you still need to use p4 or p4v to perform certain tasks. Most of the time you can live in Unreal.

You can read about and explore the Perforce integration in UE here.

The Unreal documentation is here. It focuses on setting up a local server, etc. Lots of detail in here, mostly requires CLI tools, so maybe just treat it as reference.

Basic Workflows

Once you’ve synced your files, you’re ready to start working. Remember, the workspace files are stored in a directory on your machine, here, for me, a subdirectory of /Users/fxpppr/Perforce.1

Now you’re ready to use Unreal to work on your project.

Managing and editing files

First, you need to launch your project in Unreal. You can just double-click the .uproject file in your workspace directory. This will open Unreal and load your project.

Danger Note

When you are the first person to download some of our template files, you are presented with a dialog box asking if you want to update the UE project to the latest version. If you do say yes, it will update the project files but it will also check out the files so the changes can be made.

You have to be sure and check the file back in, lest you leave it dangling ‘open’ and checked out.

Notice that this should only happen the first time, it only modifies the .uproject file. When someone checks it back in, it has now been updated for everyone. But, of course, each member of the team needs to download it.

Alternately, you can use the p4v client to open your project. This is useful if you want to see what files you have checked out, or if you want to check out files from within the Perforce client.

Setting up Perforce Integration

When you first launch the project you’ll need to set up Perforce integration.

Setting up UE

After you launch your project, you can set up Perforce integration. This is done in the Source Control menu in Unreal, found at the lower-right of the main window.2

Figure 9: The Source Control menu in Unreal. You can set up Perforce integration here as well as manage checking things in and out.

Select Connect to Source Control and then select Perforce.

Figure 10: Select the provider Perforce from the list of source control systems.

You’ll be asked for your Perforce credentials here and to select a workspace to associate with the project. You should select the workspace you set up earlier. You might have to log in to get the popup list of available workspaces to appear.

Figure 11: Enter your Perforce credentials and select the workspace you set up earlier.
Figure 12: This sets your project to be associated with your Perforce workspace.

You can use the Source Control menu to check out files, submit changes, and see what files are checked out.

Figure 13: The Source Control menu in Unreal. You can check out files, submit changes, and see what files are checked out.

Working with Perforce in Unreal

  1. Levels, Levels, Levels. You should partition the project into as many levels and sublevels at practical. If you have someone working on a specific area, they should create a new level or sublevel for their work. This will help to keep changes isolated and make it easier to manage the project.

  2. Did I mention levels?

  3. More to come…

    1. Levels
    2. Check out vs. Locks
    3. The P4 Bot at https://rit.enterprise.slack.com/archives/C09JUVA0A1H
    4. So much more …

Footnotes

  1. On the servers and stage machines, we store the files on drive D: in a directory called p4.↩︎

  2. Note that, depending on how you launch Unreal, you may see a dialog box saying that this file is ‘locked’ and, do you want to unlock it. You should say ‘yes’, and realize that it is different than ‘checking it out’ in Perforce. This is a local lock, not a Perforce lock.↩︎