PlayMaker Help & Tips > PlayMaker Tips & Tricks

Improving The Workflow

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NateGallardo:
This is a great guide Thore!

I have a couple of small points to add:

Colours
I use colours religiously! I disagree with Thore here, but obviously it's completely subjective personal preference. I use colours to group states that are related in some sense, as well as placement. This helps me to understand the graph at a glance, and enabling coloured links also helps in busier graphs where links overlap to see what is feeding into a state.

I also use a couple of custom colours for very specific purposes. For example, I always user Error states where appropriate, usually with DataMaker and ArrayMaker actions. I always name these sequentially, and they're always red. I too use magenta for WIP stuff!

Pins
As we all know, complex graphs can become tricky to keep tidy at times. I use  empty states, named sequentially starting with Pin 1 and exclusively coloured black, to feed transitions into so that I can force links to move cleanly around states rather than cross over them. In the absence of a true 'pin' function in Playmaker this works really well! I don't know if I'm explaining that very well so I'll pop up a screenshot later.

Mouse Shortcuts
I switch obsessively between curvy and square links and between left and right transitions to keep my graphs tidy. So I created a few macros in my mouse software to allow me to toggle between curvy/square and left/right with a single button press. 

djaydino:
hi,
One more to add, for action that have an error event :

Make state and set a global transition.
Inside the state you can (optionally) use the action "Get Previous State Name" and then you can use a set text to show the state.
This is good for debugging on devices.

Thore:

--- Quote from: jeanfabre on September 19, 2017, 02:42:20 AM ---Hi,

 This could go on the wiki actually. Thore, w can add you to the wiki authors, would you like that?

Bye,

 Jean

--- End quote ---

Sure. :)


--- Quote from: NateGallardo on September 19, 2017, 06:42:43 AM ---
Pins
As we all know, complex graphs can become tricky to keep tidy at times. I use  empty states, named sequentially starting with Pin 1 and exclusively coloured black, to feed transitions into so that I can force links to move cleanly around states rather than cross over them. In the absence of a true 'pin' function in Playmaker this works really well! I don't know if I'm explaining that very well so I'll pop up a screenshot later.

--- End quote ---

Thanks for the reply. I'm curious about this one! Screenshot would be very nice.

MajorIdea:
This is really good. Thanks a lot!

One question though - I don't know how if this is true but isn't placing a bunch of empty states as labels going to affect editor performance? It usually shows a warning when we have too many states in an FSM.

djaydino:
Hi,
When there are no actions/transitions inside them i believe they should not affect any performance.

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