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Author Topic: [Newbie] Something I don´t like about playmaker.  (Read 3064 times)

ramones

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[Newbie] Something I don´t like about playmaker.
« on: March 06, 2013, 07:03:15 AM »
Hi!,

I just started with playmaker today. I'm a full time programmer but would like to have a tool to let my designers help with the game design to have a bit more time to spend on other matters.

I have finished seeing the Animation Graph video and there's something that has really shocked me. When you are building transitions to the different states based on speeds, you don't have visual feedback in the FSM editor. I mean, I was expecting to see a transition from walk to run with some kind of mark, etc... when currentSpeed>=runSpeed. All the transition logic is hidden in the state making understand the FSM really difficult at a first glance. Is this the way playmaker works? Why not have events for this kind of "if" statements?

I'm really sorry to post a complain for my first post, but I'm checking playmaker and uscript and would like to know which suits best for my needs.

Thanks in advance.

Robert Foster

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Re: [Newbie] Something I don´t like about playmaker.
« Reply #1 on: March 06, 2013, 08:12:11 AM »
playmaker  is cool and fast  some part is easy some is not  but say with playmaker i have for 2 year  take the tutorial  it abut a week let it all  sink in

ramones

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Re: [Newbie] Something I don´t like about playmaker.
« Reply #2 on: March 06, 2013, 01:17:09 PM »
I don't doubt it, but I would like to know if it is possible to do what I suggested in my previous post.

Alex Chouls

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Re: [Newbie] Something I don´t like about playmaker.
« Reply #3 on: March 06, 2013, 02:58:36 PM »
Are you asking if you can evaluate an event as code? If so, you can't currently do that. However, you could name the event "currentSpeed>=runSpeed" ;)

But I'm not sure I follow exactly what you want to see...

Playmaker is designed around levels of abstraction.

Scene View: You can see the current state of an FSM on a GameObject.

PlayMakerFSM Inspector: You can see Variables and Events flagged to show in the Inspector. For example, you might expose the "runTransitionSpeed" here for tweaking. But the inner workings of the FSM are black boxed.

GraphView: You can see the structure of the FSM. State and event names are supposed to be human legible, so you can follow the logic. You can even build and test the FSM in this view without sending events "for real." E.g., Alt-click events to trigger them.

State Inspector: The low level "code" run in each state.

Anyway, that's the idea. So basically when you're happy with any particular level you can essentially forget about it and work at a higher level (e.g., tweaking the runTransitionSpeed for different characters). Then drill back down when you need to... (e.g. to add an animation to the graph, or change the transition logic).

But there's certainly room for offering more information in each view... E.g., easy ways to expose variable values in the Scene View, or showing more info in the Graph View...

I love suggestions for this stuff. Mocked up screenshots are even better ;)

ramones

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Re: [Newbie] Something I don´t like about playmaker.
« Reply #4 on: March 06, 2013, 04:34:31 PM »
Well, I think I will have to play a bit more with playmaker. I think my first impression was not correct. Let me have some more playmaker and I will come back with suggestions :).

Thanks in advance.