Long story short: I’m starting on gamedev and want to get accustomed to version control without taking too much time learning about it
I know this is kinda asking to be spoonfed the answer, but truth is I don’t have a lot of free time and wish to focus mine on not losing interest in this new hobby (I know getting stuck on details and scope is one of the main pitfalls of new gamedevs). I also want to get used to do things the right way (otherwise I wouldn’t even be thinking about it this early) anywhere I can that isn’t too distracting from the goal. At least I’m contributing discussions to the community.
I know there are a few self hosted git options, but I don’t really understand much of what using git is like, technically I “learned” to use github for version control when doing a web dev course but I couldn’t keep a single part of that segment in long term memory.
I am looking for something I can host on my server and that I can push to from godot or a gui client (from linux). I am looking to selfhost partly for the giggles (if it’s somehow too complicated I’m willing to give up on that part) and partly because I don’t want to keep my stuff on someone else’s server if I can avoid it. I’m also trying to avoid having to learn about how to properly use it for as long as I can.
I think I’ve read about gitea on here before? I’d rather avoid ai-assisted projects because of the low commitment threshold to push updates, I’m pretty sure they’re more likely to give up with the updates than caffeine fueled coders thanks to the sunk cost fallacy.
I don’t plan on publishing anything on the time being, maybe after a while I might look into it more and use a proper service, one of my long term goals is making a foss game that people want to play, but that’s long down the road, I rather learn how to make games first.
I’d recommend using Perforce over Git. Perforce in my opinion is easier to understand and use, as well as more widely used in the game industry.
The big difference between the two is centralized vs decentralized, Perforce being centralized and Git being decentralized. Plainly put P4 is one server with clients checking files in and out from it and tracking those changes, where Git is multiple servers merging their changes together.
In your use case here both are free to use. You should keep in mind that P4 wants to run on bare metal as you mentioned hosting this in your own server, so if you were thinking of spinning up something in proxmox or docker you may run into issues.
Whatever you use, making sure you have meaningful commit messages is the most important thing, especially if you’re going to be working with others. A brief idea of why a file was a changed six months ago is much more helpful than a commit message that says “…” or “updated”.