New Plastic SCM web experience open beta now live on the Unity Dashboard!

[mariechristineb]

The new Plastic SCM web experience open beta is now live on the Unity Dashboard! Documentation is availablehere.

Back in June, we put out a call for beta users for the new Plastic SCM web experience, which embedded powerful Version Control System (VCS) functionality directly within the Unity Dashboard. We’re very happy to report that we are opening this functionality to all Plastic SCM Cloud Edition users in the form of an open beta!

You can now bring team members on board, manage user permissions, browse files and repositories, and navigate changes directly in Unity Dashboard. You can also add markdown files and embed images and GIFs!



One of our top feature requests for Plastic SCM was for a rich code review experience on the web, for multiple reviewers, with the intent to merge. We are happy to announce this new code review experience is now available as of today!



You will be able to see exactly what changes were made, when they were done, and by whom with the annotate and blame feature. You will also have the ability to sort changes by a date range, actions, color coding or labels. A simple click brings more detail and diffs the code.

Here is a list of the Plastic SCM functionality you can now conduct out of the Unity Dashboard:

Onboarding

Admins can now invite new users to an org, and add or adjust various permissions for that user at both the org and repository level, directly from the Unity dashboard. They can also view current Users and create or modify User Groups.


Code Review

The Code Review tab in the Unity Dashboard shows all open Code Review tasks, including ones specifically assigned to you as a user.

You can also use this tab to create a Code Review request, indicate what has changed, and even add multiple reviewers, who will immediately be notified of the new review.



Reviews can be conducted in several different views, including a Full File View, which shows all lines of code and highlights what has changed, where, and when, a paired down view which ONLY displays what has changed, and even Side-by-Side and Tree Views that will be familiar to users of GitHub and GitLab.

 



Monitor Usage

Admins can use the Dashboard to filter on specific timelines to track how repo size or active user count has changed. They can also gauge product engagement among their user base, tracking more granular usage statistics like the number of diffs, branches, merges, and code reviews.


How to Access

The new Plastic SCM web experience is now open to all users of Plastic SCM Cloud Edition. For new users, this functionality will be immediately available to you once you sign up for Plastic SCM Cloud Edition.

Once signed into the Unity Dashboard, you will see the new tabs under the Plastic SCM Cloud Edition section of the DevOps tab.

Note that if your Plastic SCM org is encrypted, you will not be able to view any of your files in the Unity Dashboard. If you’d like to visualize your files in the new experience, you will need to open a new Cloud org and reupload your data. Our support team can guide you through this process.


We will be monitoring this thread closely, so feel free to share your experience and feedback with us here.

Happy creating!

[KristofMorva]

Hey @mariechristineb!

It's great to see Code Reviews getting some improvements!

However, I'm a bit confused about this Unity Dashboard thing. What's the connection between the tools available on plasticscm.com versus this dashboard? Do we really need two websites and two accounts to use all features of Plastic?

Also, "How to Access" says that for new users it's automatically available - but there's no note as to how to use and link it properly for existing customers as far as I can see.

Maybe I'm being dumb and missing something obvious here, in that case sorry 😄

[ollieblanks]

Hey @KristofMorva,

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Maybe I'm being dumb and missing something obvious here, in that case sorry 😄

These are not dumb questions! Thank you for raising them.

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What's the connection between the tools available on plasticscm.com versus this dashboard? Do we really need two websites and two accounts to use all features of Plastic?

The Unity Dashboard is just a new improved dashboard. Users are welcome to continue using both, or just the one. 

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Also, "How to Access" says that for new users it's automatically available - but there's no note as to how to use and link it properly for existing customers as far as I can see.

This functionality is already available for existing users too. You just need a Unity ID to access it.

Hope this helps!

 

[Marc S]

I agree with @KristofMorva, the mix between Plastic and Unity is confusing. These are two different services and it doesn't make sense to have a version control interface on the game engine dashboard.

On 11/16/2022 at 5:28 PM, ollieblanks said:

You just need a Unity ID to access it.

As a veteran on both services, I have two different accounts created before the buyout and can't connect on Unity with the Plastic one.

Please, keep them separated.

Thanks

[tucny]

I second to @KristofMorva and @Marc S. I perfectly understand Unity's focus on games and 3D. However: Plastic was and hopefuly will keep being a general-purpose version control system.

Our main business is enterprise software in a regulated area — banking. Running on-premise and running only those things we want and use is quite crucial. Consider having to go through audits and certifications such as PCI DSS. I can't have stuff like "Distribution portal" or "My Games" on the screen

Where I would really love to see Unity taking PlasticSCM is a source control and management platform on-par with GitHub, which can run both in the cloud as well as on-premises (or at least as dedicated instances in a private cloud).

[ollieblanks]

Although Unity is primarily a 3D engine company, we do intend to keep Plastic SCM as a versatile Source Control tool for everyone. Thank you for sharing your feedback, I will pass all this on to the team.

[Acren]

I've been trying to use the new code reviews with my team so I'll collect some feedback here and update when I find more things:

- Initial impressions are it looks much cleaner and a step up from the built-in interface.

- I share the confusion above about Unity dashboard and separate accounts. However I can probably guess that the goal is to move everything to use this environment and deprecate the old one. If that's the case it might make sense eventually.

- What we are missing the most from GitHub pull requests and other similar systems is the ability to paste images directly into comments. This is really handy when needing to reference something visual in a game by screenshot, or show part of a visual scripting graph.
Are there any plans to add this functionality?

- We would love email notifications from code review activity like GitHub and competitors. We use plastic triggers for this currently but it's clunky, buggy and confusing. e.g. Deleting a comment currently sends a trigger to our slack with "New comment to the review 'Review Name' > Under review" which is wrong...

- It would be helpful to have some sort of "closed" state for code reviews. In some cases we've wanted to abandon the changes proposed in a code review, so "changes required" is not applicable. We also did not want to delete the code review because we want to preserve the conversation to look up in the future.

- It unfortunately feels quite slow currently, the front end is quick but it waits a very long time on the backend to do basically anything. For example, it takes about 15 seconds after a code review loads for the comments to appear.

- Bug? When the "reviewers" of a code review is set to a group, it doesn't work at all. Nobody can review it even if they are in the group.

- Bug? The "files changed" isn't actually files changed in the branch. It appears to be a straight diff of the branch against the target branch. Which means that any changes on the target branch will also show up there inversely, which doesn't seem correct. I think maybe what we should see is a dry-run merge, showing exactly what would be changed on the target branch if it were merged.

- Maybe a bug? I would like to @ mention other developers on my team in my plastic code review comment, however the list of users it suggests after typing "@" are not from my organization and I have no idea where they come from.

- Bug? The number inside the "Changed Files (n)" tab changes when you select different tabs.

- Another bug? Members of my organization can all see the same code reviews, but we cannot link code reviews to each other. The organization ID in the link is different for all of us and we all get error 403 when trying to access a link given by another team member.

- Switching to another tab in the code review discards the comment you are writing without warning. This hurts when you are writing a comment and you need to switch to another tab to see the changes and the comment is lost. With something like GitHub, the comment would be preserved when you switch back.

- This one is less technical, but with the code reviews, the "rework required" icon being a thumbs down feels a bit negative like it's saying "bad job" when in reality it mostly means "good work but please change this". I'd almost be averse to using it, as I think feedback on changes should be treated as a natural part of the process and not like something is wrong.

I hope it helps. I think there's quite a way to go still, but it's definitely in the right direction.

[givetimetolife]

looks very cool !!!

[tucny]

On 1/11/2023 at 10:11 AM, ollieblanks said:

Although Unity is primarily a 3D engine company, we do intend to keep Plastic SCM as a versatile Source Control tool for everyone. Thank you for sharing your feedback, I will pass all this on to the team.

I hope Unity will keep its word. PlasticSCM is a superb version control product, and both on-premises and cloud general-purpose use cases are legitimate and long-term.