This was in conversations with them, and I can’t confirm. It is so significantly buried, though, even in the documentation from them directly. I had to discuss a bit with one of their engineers to have him explain it.

From what I gather (though again, haven’t tested) Plastic works as a Perforce replacement until you tell your local client to work in a distributed mode. It then grabs everything and allows you to work from there, I assume similarly to how hgsvn works.

Now that I’ve been using hgsvn for a few weeks, I will say it works fairly well, but not without its faults. I find I have to collapse my change sets at every commit, and force edit commit messages, because it’s not completely intuitive how it will commit things. Just thought you should know.

Where do you see them claiming to have solved the problem we’re talking about, though? I couldn’t see anything about it in my brief look

I can’t say that it’s good or does what you expect, but it might be worth looking into.

On the subject of VCS, one feature I would like out of a centralized lockable asset repo is a mobile-accessible interface for locking files, so that the minimum technology required to lock an asset is a smart phone with signal. Other than trans-oceanic travel, I’m hard-pressed to contrive many use cases where I would be unable lock my files. Would be kludgy, but also very useful, I suspect.

What you really want is a hybric dvcs. You want to be able to mark some files as centralized/unmergable, and some as distributed. You need to be able to mix these arbitrarily in a source tree, and not have to run two different commands. You want to be able to have svn style local revert and whatnot, but you don’t need/want to have full history for these files, or better yet, you want to set how much history you keep for them. And, they need to be lockable, so an artist can check one out, modify it, and another artist is prevented from checking out the same file while this is happening. If you’re offline, it doesn’t let you check it out by default, but you can override it, and on your head be it (you have to revert if you reconnect and it’s been locked, say).

I don’t know any dvcs that is even contemplating real support for mixed code/content development like this, but it sure would be awesome.