Just wanted to announce that we recently added Gluon support for the Plastic SCM Unity Plugin.
Gluon is the GUI we designed with artists in mind, you know, working with big files, need to lock instead of branching (and of course no merging if possible) and so on.
We built Gluon around these 3 principles (with great help from our folks at Telltale Games, who were key during the design and development and helped as beta testers first and then as full time users):
As a user I will select the files that I will work on, makes changes to and easily submit. I don’t ever want to deal with merging or branching files either. Those functions should happen in the background automatically.
As a user I want to lock files so that nobody can work with them at the same time.
As a user I don’t want to be forced to download a file repository containing tons of huge files just so I can access the one or two files that I need to work on. I should be able to select only the files I want to work on and download those.
The GUI is greatly simplified, just focusing on what really matters to artists.
And the other key feature to highlight is that Gluon lets you pick and choose exactly which files (or directories) to download, and lets you checkin a single file even when the rest of the workspace is out of date, in typical “file oriented” version control fashion, which is sort of unique considering Plastic is a distributed version control tool. And you can do it while still working on the same repository as programmers, so now there can be two totally different ways of working on the same repo.
After talking to many teams using Unity, we developed a solution that meets the key requirements that they need to manage their projects online:
Handle big files correctly – Plastic is not built on Git, and it is designed to deal with huge assets.
Provide exclusive locking to handle non-mergeable assets.
An artist-oriented GUI – Yep, coders and artists have different needs, so instead of trying a one-size-fits-all solution, we developed Gluon specifically for artists. Simple GUI, no branching, no merging, just select what you need to work on and checkin.
Still all the power of branching and merging for the coders + full distributed version control (push/pull on your local clone) – And that’s something we’re very good at. Check our Branch Explorer and our merge engine.
Cloud storage without size restrictions – You start with 5GB, but there’s no limit and we won’t ask you to remove your project once you go beyond 2 GB or anything like that. In fact, 100GB projects are welcome.
And full integration with Unity – We have a native plugin and lots of improvements in our GUI for artists specifically focused on Unity.
In short, Plastic SCM Cloud Editon is the sum of all the Plastic software (GUI, visual diff, Gluon, merge tool) + Plastic Cloud – all in a single monthly subscription. You only pay for the active users every month plus the cloud storage you’re using.
If you want to learn more about what we do in the game dev space, check this.
