Plastic SCM

Requestor Work Location:

Granger High School

Requestor Title:

Teacher

Active:

True

Description:

Plastic SCM is a Source Control Manager, similar to GitHub that was created by Unity to integrate with the Unity Game Engine Editor and provide collaboration and source control features for Unity projects. Our students have been using Unity Collaborate to work together on shared projects for over five years. For the last two years, Plastic SCM has been the underlying software that has provide this "Collaborate" service, but Unity is now deprecating the built-in "single-branch" source control and forcing an upgrade to the newer Plastic SCM interface that is now the only option for in editor source control. Unfortunately, the new interface requires a port to be opened to allow communication with the Plastic servers from school computers. Many student projects have already been impacted, and all student projects will be transferred to Plastic by the end of February 2022. To be honest, Unity intended this transition to be seamless and painless. If the ports were open, each student would have been presented with a simple pop up message telling them their project was automatically being transferred and then the old interface would have been replaced with a very similar interface with a new name and a few additional features, like the ability to fork and create variant branches in a project and the ability to restore individual files. Instead, they get time out messages when they try to upgrade, and are locked out of their old method of collaborating with a message that the project has been archived and they need to switch to Plastic SCM. The software I am submitting is the desktop user client for Plastic SCM. It is simply a local replacement for the web browser based interface Plastic provides. Neither it nor the web interface is needed by our students. In fact they don't even need a plastic account because they do everything with Plastic in the editor using their Unity log in. However, I was told that the only way to justify opening a port was to request approval for the software that needs it open. Since this is an integrated part of Unity, it seems that the approval for Unity should already meet that requirement; however, this software can be used in conjunction with the Unity interface for a more streamlined user experience, so having this interface approved shouldn't really be an issue, either.

URL:

https://www.plasticscm.com/download/10.0.16.6505/plasticscm/windows/cloudedition

Purpose/Use/Notes:

Software Management, Source Control, and Student collaboration for the Unity Game Engine. Plastic SCM is now a required part of using unity collaboratively.

Login/Access Information for Evaluation:

Type of Software:

Licensing:

Vendor Technical Contact Name:

None

Vendor Technical Contact Phone Number:

No number available

Lower Grade Range:

9th Grade

Upper Grade Range:

12th Grade

Category:

CTE

Utah State Core Correlation Standard(s):

Game Development Fundamentals 1 - STRAND 5 - Students will be able to create and develop a game, in one of the identified game genres (Action, Adventure, RPG, Simulation or Strategy), using the Game Design Production Cycle. Computer Programming 1 - ALL STRANDS - Because we use Unity as our development environment, all of the learning objectives are accomplished using Unity.

Is student data shared with the vendor?

False

Icon for student\stuff use:

Screenshot URL:

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