There are 2 of us mainly that will be working a hour or so a night on a game were creating and we would like to work together on a shared filesystem at the same time and get the updates of each other as they happen.

I know this can lead to issues like breaking each others work or even overwriting each other but if we stay on our own portions we can work on two separate things and see results of both immediately also backups will be made quite often just in case

The current thought is to mount sourceforges sftp in both locations and do all the editing on there but im curious if it will push out changes or when refreshes will happen and if it has a cache as some things wont change often if ever and are big (note most of our changes will be graphics and scripting small stuff)

Anyone else have a solution or ideas about a good way to go?

That sounds more complicated than it needs to be. if you were to use dropbox it would run your syncs for you automatically and would also produce conflict files for you... it's not that great of a conflict resolution but it works. But this is all making me wonder if you have ever heard of git or svn? Those are source control tools that teams often use for working on the same code base and have great conflict resolution tools. If you were to get 3 people working on the same code at the same time I would make the switch to git for sure.

What I imagine you are going for as your ideal setup might be something like using google docs where you can watch each other live edit on the web. It would bother me to not have a good text editor but based on what you are saying I imagine that's what you would like best.(Doc files can be on your desktop also but not in the same live edit way, though it will live update your local files as you edit on the web)

It is very dangerous. Lost updates are annoying and waste a lot of time.

Most people use a version control system for that. For small personal projects Git is currently popular, as is Subversion. Both have different models that have better or worse support in different situations.

In addition to letting both of you work on the same project at once, it also preserves a history in case you need to revert a change or compare against something that you used to have. If you attempt something and realize you badly broke your project you can discard your changes and roll back to when things were better.

There are free accounts for open source projects on many different locations, but private repositories are a little harder to come by for free. You can get a (one) free private source repository from Assembla. Just scroll to the bottom of every page on the site and click the big "Assembla" button.

Yeah I get the whole git thing lol but if we each checkout and modify different parts we would have to merge and checkout to see them that isnt ideal

We are both going to be online communicating any time anything is done and so any sort of version control is unnecessary

You will need to merge anyway in the case of conflicts. Either that or just blow away each other's edits, which you wrote is a problem.

Version control during development is like a parachute when jumping from an airplane. You might not need it when you are on the ground, but as your project starts to take off it doesn't take long before you realize just how essential it is.

DropBox gives you 2+ GB for free, and you can earn more for free (I have 7.7 GB), or pay a small fee for 1000 GB. You can install it on both your computers, and any files within the dropbox folder live-sync between both computers with only a few seconds delay. File history is preserved for 30 days.

This might not be the best idea if you are both working on code, but it can work with art assets as long as you aren't both trying to edit the same file at the same time.

Because code is frequently in an "incomplete state" except for right before you are ready to test your changes, it's not the best idea to both edit the same repository at the same time. During programming sessions, code is more frequently in an incomplete state then it is in a complete state.

@frob

We would each be online talking with each other about the changes were making on different files conflicts should never be an issue

@Servant of the Lord

Yea something like dropbox does seem to be where im leaning as things like that seem to keep in sync reasonably well and looks like they have local cache

Thanks

Thanks everyone

I liked the idea of dropbox but didnt want to pay $10 a month trying to keep overhead as low as possible

I found bittorrent sync and it takes a few seconds to show the changes but works great even running it on a server so our machines dont have to be on if we decide to make changes independent of each other it keeps local copies so latency isnt an issue when playing/testing

Really, go for a version control system.

I you want to go open source you can use github.

Alternatively check out Assembla. https://www.assembla.com/home

1 Project with up to 1GB of storage is free there.