IonForge Evolution is pretty good!

I’ve been trying out various source control applications recently. At work we use Perforce. I have to admit that it’s powerful. That aside, I hate Perforce with a passion. I’ve lost work on at least 4 occassions and everytime I have a problem it’s “Perforce fucked up again” which is probably about once a week. It’s because Perforce doesn’t work well with people who do what I do, which is to work partly at home (not on Perforce) and partly at work (sometimes on Perforce).

Over the last 5 days I tried SourceGear Vault, because I’ve had really nice experiences with it when I used to work for nFusion. For usability it’s the best I’ve seen. However, the server installation is a nightmare due to external dependencies, to the point to where I decided it wasn’t worth the headache and tried installing IonForge Evolution.

I don’t have much to say about the installation of Evolution (which is a good thing). It took about half an hour to install. 5 minutes to figure out. I uploaded RakNet’s directories, setup users and groups with permissions per-directory, and that was it. I had a friend download the client and connect to me and it worked the first time. The only bad thing is it seems like uploading is pretty slow compared to Perforce or Vault. However, connections are reasonably fast unlike Vault, which takes a good 10 seconds to connect.

Evolution supports my style of working, which is to work locally without checking out and only uploading when I want to. I’m not totally sure but I think that it also supports searching for renegade files, which Vault doesn’t do short of checking out everything first.

The price is decent. Perforce is $800 per user. Vault is $289 per user. Evolution is $550 per user, but 50% off for IGDA members, so $275. Howevfer, it might be the most expensive for me. I only need 2 users. Perforce gives that for free. Vault comes with one free users. I don’t think Evolution comes with any free users. I’ll email them now to find out.