Illustration of gaming controller with logo of  Perforce and GitHub branching from a computer.
March 23, 2022

Perforce + GitHub — New Perforce Helix Core Actions

Game Development
Version Control

Building a great game involves uniting team members and their tools. But too often, developers spend more time setting up their environment and building their pipeline, rather than innovating.

Perforce Software has been working with Microsoft to address these challenges. It started with the Enhanced Studio Pack. This lets studios quickly launch a pre-configured environment with industry-leading tools.

Then at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) 2022, Perforce Software and GitHub launched the next step to help teams accelerate game development — Perforce Helix Core Actions, now available on the GitHub Marketplace.

With Perforce Helix Core Actions, studios can automate build processes so they can iterate faster and test more. This saves game creators time that would have been spent managing and performing repetitive manual tasks, allowing them to become more agile in the cloud and to implement stronger security

Why Perforce + GitHub?

Perforce Helix Core is known as the game development standard for version control. Most AAA game studios have adopted it for asset and content management. While at the same time, GitHub has been the standard tool for developers.

The disjoined environment has forced developers into diverging workflows and set up game pipelines with a variety of tools and scripts. This creates a potentially unmanageable level of complexity and overhead, especially as projects and teams grow.

Today’s release of Perforce Helix Core Actions aims to simplify the current game development process and integrate these two powerful tools using the power of GitHub Actions. It will provide game creators a powerful tool to build projects directly using both Helix Core submits or GitHub commits.

“These new actions will help automate and orchestrate game development pipelines ensuring a studio’s team can focus on more creative and important aspects of game creation. Let creators create!” — Ryan L’Italien, Director of Solutions at Perforce

Perforce Helix Core Actions Technical Details

Now, let’s dive into how it works.

The perforce/setup-p4 action is an Action that sets up Perforce Helix Core P4 CLI in your GitHub Actions workflow. It downloads a specific version of Perforce Helix Core CLI and adds it to the PATH.

In addition, Perforce Helix Core Actions includes the following features:

  • Supports all GitHub Hosted and self-hosted runner operating systems.
  • Defaults to the latest version of P4 CLI (but can be overwritten).
  • All P4 CLI commands can be run from the Action.
  • Optionally, use GitHub Action Inputs to ease setting up your P4 CLI commands.
  • The connection details of the Perforce Helix Core servers used by P4 CLI can be stored as secrets.
  • More features to come!

Using the Perforce GitHub Integration

You have a couple of options when using Perforce Helix Core Actions. First, make sure you have Helix Core installed and ready to go. The perforce/setup-p4 GitHub Action is compatible with any Helix Core deployment, including the Enhanced Studio Pack.

Choose the option that works for your team.

Option 1

  1. Go to Perforce Helix Core Actions Marketplace listing.
  2. Read through the documentation to get started.

Option 2

You can use our example GitHub template to create a new project that uses the p4 actions.

More Support

Perforce has also created a new open-source GitHub repository to further engage with the game developer community. You can participate through the GitHub Discussions and join the conversation.

By building Perforce Helix Core Actions, our team is continuing its work to support the game development community and the tools they use to build award winning games. We are looking forward to working with you to create the next set of integrations to help your teams

Not a Helix Core Customer Yet?

You can try Helix Core free for your small team. Sign up and deploy in the cloud in minutes. Then you can start using Perforce Helix Core Actions.

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