I know other version control software exists, but does anyone use it? Why? What are the differences? All I’ve ever actually seen people use is git.

  • There’s perforce which is primarily used for game development. Often games have a lot of binary files that are hard/impossible to generate diffs of unlike text based files. Perforce requires you to check out individual files and prevents any merge conflicts on an individual file basis.

    • My experience with Perforce hasn’t been really positive - especially compared to Plastic SCM, which is amazing. The merge tracking in history is such a cool feature, and it’s generally really smooth to work with.

      The only issue is the pricing model, which is also a reason why I sadly can’t use it on many projects. Unity way too greedy and their strategy is to just acquire and paywall anything usable.

    • Checkout doesn’t prevent merge conflicts (unless you configure exclusive checkout which is quite annoying). We used perforce and definitely had merge conflicts, though they weren’t as crazy as a long git branch would be.