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I learnt of Plastic SCM [1] a few days ago, apparently better suited to gamedev. Any experience or opinions? 1. https://www.plasticscm.com/ https://www.plastic

I learnt of Plastic SCM [1] a few days ago, apparently better suited to gamedev. Any experience or opinions? 1. https://www.plasticscm.com/ https://www.plasticscm.com/

muststopmyths 6y ago
I have no experience with Plastic SCM, but I will point out a couple of things you should research before settling on a non-Perforce SCM. 1. Huge files - a distributed VCS will not handle versioning them in a space-efficient manner without hacks like LFS. Plastic SCM says they handle huge files, but you want to investigate this closely. 2. Locking files - Game assets will usually be binary and non-mergeable so you need to be able to lock them so that only one person is able to edit at a time. PlasticSCM seems to have this handled according to their website. 3. Disk space - Watch the pricing for disk space. 5GB is nowhere near sufficient for a game of reasonable size. Seems reasonable at $20/month up to 100GB, but make sure you understand what you'll get. They allow for a local server, which might be useful for a company (or if you don't mind setting up your own servers). If you're a solo or small-team indie, you can probably get by using anything. git, plastic, svn or perforce. perforce even has a cloud hosting solution. There is a reason Perforce is widespread in the gaming industry and it's not because we're a bunch of mouth-breathing morons stuck in 2005.
- vvanders 6y ago
  As ex-game dev this is all right on the mark. Back when I was in gamedev the "code" checkout was ~160gb. The "art" checkout was ~500gb and the raw repo size was on the order of 3-4TB. Last I kicked the tires proper on most SCM solutions Perforce was the only one that could handle repos like that and provide locking so that people won't blow away binary files.
mentos 6y ago
No experience with Plastic it seems better suited for Unity from the little reading I did on their website. If you’re using UE4 I 1000% recommend learning Perforce because it is what Epic (the developers of UE4) use as well as thousands of other game developers. So it has great editor support and is a skill set you can transfer to other projects.

I learnt of Plastic SCM [1] a few days ago, apparently better suited to gamedev. Any experience or opinions? 1. https://www.plasticscm.com/ https://www.plasticscm.com/

muststopmyths 6y ago

I have no experience with Plastic SCM, but I will point out a couple of things you should research before settling on a non-Perforce SCM. 1. Huge files - a distributed VCS will not handle versioning them in a space-efficient manner without hacks like LFS. Plastic SCM says they handle huge files, but you want to investigate this closely. 2. Locking files - Game assets will usually be binary and non-mergeable so you need to be able to lock them so that only one person is able to edit at a time. PlasticSCM seems to have this handled according to their website. 3. Disk space - Watch the pricing for disk space. 5GB is nowhere near sufficient for a game of reasonable size. Seems reasonable at $20/month up to 100GB, but make sure you understand what you'll get. They allow for a local server, which might be useful for a company (or if you don't mind setting up your own servers). If you're a solo or small-team indie, you can probably get by using anything. git, plastic, svn or perforce. perforce even has a cloud hosting solution. There is a reason Perforce is widespread in the gaming industry and it's not because we're a bunch of mouth-breathing morons stuck in 2005.

vvanders 6y ago
As ex-game dev this is all right on the mark. Back when I was in gamedev the "code" checkout was ~160gb. The "art" checkout was ~500gb and the raw repo size was on the order of 3-4TB. Last I kicked the tires proper on most SCM solutions Perforce was the only one that could handle repos like that and provide locking so that people won't blow away binary files.

mentos 6y ago

No experience with Plastic it seems better suited for Unity from the little reading I did on their website. If you’re using UE4 I 1000% recommend learning Perforce because it is what Epic (the developers of UE4) use as well as thousands of other game developers. So it has great editor support and is a skill set you can transfer to other projects.