Some teams need to benefit from the powerful branching and merging of a distributed version control system (DVCS) but don’t want to have a clone of the repository (or repositories) on each machine. Plastic SCM allows teams to choose whether they want to work centralized or distributed. You can even choose both, with some team members using centralized and others distributed concurrently.

Any successful branching and merging pattern relies on creating branches quickly. This process should take less than a second, even for codebases containing hundreds of thousands of files. With Plastic SCM, file count is never a blocker for branch creation.

Unlike other version control systems, Plastic SCM doesn’t rely on copying existing branches to create new ones. Instead, new branches inherit their properties from a given changeset. Because this process isn’t tied to the number of files in the codebase, it always takes the same amount of time (a few milliseconds) – even for massive projects with an excess of 500,000 files on a branch.

Plastic SCM’s built-in three-way merge tool, Xmerge, features language-agnostic refactoring support, allowing you to resolve even the most complex merge conflicts in short order. You can also easily plug in third-party tools like Araxis, BeyondCompare, and others.

Any tool in Git’s ecosystem can connect to Plastic instantly using their native Git functionalities. Teams using Plastic can then benefit from all the DevOps, CI, and project management integrations developed specifically for Git.

Plastic SCM’s GitSync provides bidirectional synchronization between Plastic and Git. Plastic communicates with Git network protocols to push and pull packages and merges to a remote Git server (and the reverse). This allows you to use the Plastic GUI as a Git client: Because Plastic is structured somewhat similarly to Git, you can exchange all changesets, branches, and merges between them.

GitServer is GitSync’s server-side counterpart. It closes the Git interoperability loop by allowing Plastic SCM to serve repositories using Git protocols (Git and HTTP supported).

Cross-links, or Xlinks, are essentially merge-aware Git modules. Use them to link together different repositories and create a hierarchy of components shared among different projects. 

An Xlink is a special directory entry that points to a given changeset on a different repository (potentially on a different server). The contents of the Xlink are downloaded transparently to the user workspace. 

Read-only Xlinks are meant to handle dependencies that rarely change, while writable Xlinks enable parallel development across codebases with several repositories. Plastic handles branching and merging on writable Xlinks.

Plastic SCM has a range of security features to protect your source code. Set permissions to repositories, branches, labels, and paths to not only secure the codebase but also enforce policies and security best practices within your team.

Plastic SCM is optimized for a variety of gamedev scenarios and supports both Unreal and Unity. Creating with Unity? Get the Version Control Package directly from the Unity Package Manager. Enjoy true collective project ownership with a deeply embedded, flexible, and reliable version control solution that everyone can easily understand and use.

Codelens is now installed as a part of Visual Studio 2022 Plastic SCM extension. When you create the Plastic SCM data point above a method, property, or type, it will display a list of up to 10 of the last changes in that element. This leverages the semantic technologies in Plastic SCM, showing only changes in the file that affect the annotated element. Keep in mind that this feature will only show up in semantic-available files (C#, C, C++) in a Plastic SCM Workspace.