Perforce Polishes Its Imaging

By Jeff Feinman

August 18, 2008 —  Perforce Software has ratcheted up the visual differencing functionality of its namesake software configuration management product.

Perforce COO Nigel Chanter said the company has created interoperability with a number of third-party tools over the years, including Microsoft’s Word, Office and PowerPoint, and Adobe’s Photoshop. Perforce 2008.1, released today, carries along in the same vein but opens some opportunities for image creation.

The “image diffing tool,” as Chanter called it, can work on multiple platforms and lets users compare a changed image to an unchanged image in a side-by-side form via the Perforce Visual Client. Perforce executives said that while similar tools have side-by-side viewing features, Perforce 2008.1 has a highlight feature that will gray out sections of images that haven’t changed and will highlight changes in yellow. A user can then overlay two images using a blending algorithm.

“If a game company has an image where they’re changing the color of Darth Vader’s helmet, this tool will allow them to compare Darth Vader with a black helmet and Darth Vader with a purple helmet, for example,” said John Walker, Perforce’s principal product consultant.

While Perforce isn’t moving away from its software configuration management roots, it’s looking to broaden its user base, Chanter said. In the early days of Perforce, which has been in business since 1995, the largely text-file-based environment was skewed toward source code development. Over the years, however, game developers have been storing binary files, and the binary data has grown as game quality has improved, he said.

“We’re bringing more and more people into the fold—users who aren’t necessarily writing code,” Chanter said. “One of the things Perforce has always been good at is storing large binary files, and we’re getting more users who are handling binary files, whether in Excel spreadsheets or in Word documents.”

For software development, Chanter said, it is vital that the both text and image files be exactly correct when comes time to build the final release. That’s a main reason the company has focused on image editing, he said.

Image diffing can work with most common image files, including TIFF, JPG and GIF, according to Perforce.

Another improvement to Perforce 2008.1 is improved capabilities for distributed development. An enhanced Perforce Visual Client improves remote access to the Perforce Server by allowing users to work offline and to browse local files, the company said. A self-maintaining proxy server offloads file decompression to the client to speed remote access.

“You want to make sure that the file remains compressed as its being transferred to the remote client,” Walker said.



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