[GDN]  What are the pieces of the Perforce SCM and who specifically in a game development company would use the software?

Perforce takes the view that everything we do should be as simple as possible; enabling any contributor to a project to see what is being worked on and not getting in the way of the creative flow. 

The Perforce Server is used to store any and all digital assets and the project team can use Perforce clients or integrations into their own tools to interact with it. Project administrators can use the Microsoft Office Plugin to Perforce, artists can use the Graphical Tools Plugin and coders can use the IDE Plugin. Everyone within a game development company involved in bringing a new game to market benefits from using the software, from developers and project managers to web designers.

One of the great things about Perforce is that both digital assets and source code can be managed. Source code changes can be easily reviewed using the Revision Graph and Time Lapse View functions and the Image diff  tool makes it easy to see even the smallest changes to a graphic.

[GDN] What gives Perforce an advantage over other commercial SCM applications?

Perforce brings many advantages over other commercial SCM applications. Perforce is flexible enough to support your process; easy enough to use such that everyone can be involved who needs to be; low administrative overhead (1:120 of the effort of some other systems); fast; scalable; never breaks, supports massively distributed teams and is designed to cater for the huge data volumes of the games industry.

As an example, Rebellion (one of our customers) told us, “One of our programmers, who decided that the Time Lapse View is one of the best features ever, says he now has much better source control. The Time Lapse View is one of the key features, as it really helps the teams see the timeline of a file, what has been changed and when, really quickly. This is important as you may work on a file over a period of time and if you need to quickly work out when it went wrong in that time, you’ve got the timeline view to refer to. Also, artists are really picky about the tools they use, but as Perforce is a very easy system to use, they get the hang of it very quickly.”
(http://www.developmag.com/interviews/63/Project-Management-Case-Study-QA-Rebellion)