Source Control - A good alternative today

In a recent thread here on the forum, I saw an important discussion about the use of source control to avoid data loss, and better collaboration between the development team.

My question is, what would be the best option today for game development in Unity?

I see that some devs have been using collaborate for a while, but with the recent acquisition of PlasticSCM by Unity, would this be a good alternative solution today?

Another example cited is GIT (perhaps the most famous of them all), but I find it a bit "sticky", and not intuitive at all, especially for artists, but it still does its job. And a little further away we have Perforce which I know very little about.

So, I know there is no perfect software, but which alternative best serves developers on Unity?
Who has more experience in this area, please comment your opinions

 

Collab will slow down productivity dramatically. At least it did for me. And I don't feel that it is reliable. A lot of times when you push to commit it fails, seemingly randomly, so then you push it again and then it just works. That just doesn't make you feel like you can trust the system, so then you waste time double checking everything all the time...

The real productivity killer though is that collab does something - some sort of check - everytime you open the project. If the project is more than a gb, this check can take ages. Maybe there is something you can do to avoid this, but this cuts into user friendliness. It takes time and energy to fight the engine that could be spent producing gameplay.

Github desktop with LFS is easy peezee. That's as user friendly as it gets. Low price as well for storage space (cheaper than unity storage space)

My major concern is 1. how simple it is to use, and 2. is it reliable? For me Github desktop fits the bill perfectly.

I have only briefly looked at other options, but they seem to have more steps involved, are more geared towards elite programmers/large teams, and so on. I just went with the one that took least amount of time and energy to use, and works.

 

Like you said there is no perfect software but the question you are asking is not the right one either. When you want to narrow down version control you do so by determining the needs of the team rather than the needs of the software. Unity has meta files and has things that need ignoring. Both of these are handled by every VCS.

One common recommendation is Unity plus the LFS extension (LFS enables large files in the repo) for multiple reasons with one of the most common being the ability to make branches without having to duplicate the entire project saving space on whichever server hosts it.

For work I'm currently using SVN because that's the version control system chosen by the lead developer and while it definitely has downsides (its less common than Git and therefore has fewer hosting providers) it's not a terrible one either.

 

Yes, for my own work I use Github Desktop a lot, it is extremely easy to set up and simple to manipulate.

Now I'm looking at PlasticSCM as a good alternative for working in larger teams (4 to 10 people) looks interesting

 

I haven't used Unity in years but just reading threads on the forum one could get the impression the less "official" things related to Unity that you use in your Unity project, the better off you are.

 

Wow SVN, your lead must be older and more stodgy than I am.

 

just seems like everything is in alpha. And not an alpha state I would consider to be useful to release.
i usually don't know enough to argue a case but i can keep track of time and if i'm spending a vastly greater time figuring out engine bugs with one tools versus another... well people can blame the user all they want but in the end convenience and user friendlieness is going to win. You might expect the engine geared towards rapid produced mobile games and tiny indie stuff would be the winner in that department though.

anyway, don't mean to derail buy yeah... collab isn't even worth considering IMO.

 

I've tried Collab once. It lacked features like the ability to make branches which I find mandatory for any team maybe they updated that. Also has low storage and somewhat expensive competing with Git. Is Git really that difficult? I think if your not using it you are putting yourself at a disadvantage since pretty much every single software company uses Git.

 

I'd stick with git. Lack of "intuitiveness" is not very important, as it can be overcome with practice.

It's not CVS, so that's a start.

 

Kids these days probably look at CVS like we looked at fortran!

 

You have no idea how much I hated to switch from CVS to SVN and later from SVN to Perforce and/or Git...