For distributed map editing, how do you guys manage multiple users editing the same files remotely? There’s always the plain FTP route but that makes versioning difficult to track. I’ve been looking at various online collaboration applications but none of them seem to be well suited for these kinds of tasks.
What kind of software or methodologies do you editing gurus use?
yet we at wolfproject just told everybody which part we were working on and then after some time put all the parts together, this will hopefully change soon as i am working at an online tool to manage collaborative mapping, it will have version controlling in future, at the moment it lets people select an area of the map, then download it - until they upload it again the part of the map is locked, then unlocked and reintegrated into the master map, all this is working in the basics already but not ready for release as it’s a "§$load of work… so if anybody reads this who has good experience in PHP and mysql - i really could need a helping hand
anyway i will announce it when the tool is done, i just hope it does the job
A CVS server might do the trick (wont solve the problem with several ppl working on one .map file though) but all the other stuff (scripts, shaders, textures etc) will probably work pretty good.
Check out www.cvsnt.org.
subversion http://subversion.tigris.org/ is a nice CVS substitute. However, map files don’t version well, because radiant re-orders them on every save. You can still use it for locking and sequential backups, but don’t expect branching/merging to work 
Having people work on distinct areas shouldn’t be too hard, just have each area saved off as a prefab. Work in it in a box, and then inegrate it into the main map.
I think there were some comments from the splash folks on this sort of thing a while ago, search might dig them up.
PM me if you’d like my help. I’ve been coding PHP and mySQL for a while now plus I really would like to get something like this going for my mapping project.