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Playmaker 2.0

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Broken Stylus:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-visual-scripting-2017.462181/
Check the 2017 video
Beegees Space Pirate says:


--- Quote ---"There are a lot of different visual scripting solutions out there, but none of them really work well all the way from prototyping, maintaining, debugging and deploying high performance shipping-quality visual scripts."
--- End quote ---

I know this was a statement made in 2017 but back then PM already provided a good option for prototyping.
Maintaining is highly dependent on Unity's own set of tools regarding team collaboration. PM's internal issues regarding the management of Global variables could be held against PM though, but it's not that hard to maintain a PM project. In fact with something like FSM log, PM provides a native tool to follow the evolution of a script. FSM timeline is a nice tool although I think it could need an extra option to filter FSMs that talk to each other (it would need to parse the get/set actions, send event to X, goto y state in z FSM, etc.), maybe even presented under the form of some horizontal branching tree too. So that would be a little overhaul of the Timeline tool.
Debugging is rather transparent and quite easy to do, for the same reasons explained above. Several autohelpers are present too. When PM is fully deployed there is just no way you cannot find the little nagging bug that's creating a problem.
As for shipping-quality content, ready for deployment, it boils down to what you understand by that. Is it a 100% made in VS app (game or not btw), or is it something that integrates VS to some extent? Obviously a large "made with [name of VS tool]" catalogue would help bring confidence into the possibilities of VS based development, but a lot of this relies on PR and heavy communication, from web site to video content, fairs, webinars, etc.

Also, regarding Unity, they did announce a big move into VS back in 2017 and then postponed it. We're in 2019 and they sort of seem to imply a renewal of the interest in VS but are again pushing it to a later date.

Finally, to see what was being said on the other side of the river, a reply about this VS tool Unity is working from Bolt's main coder.

I'm wondering what kind of beast Unity will become, they are literally working on two engines right now, the classic one that's in the DNA of the tool since its inception, and the new ECS based one that's friendly towards multithreading, which would usually concern large budged indsutry games or software, to manage countless entities at once. They want to get out of the indie zone.

Broken Stylus:
It's also possible that node-based VS is a fad for gullible morons.  ;D

jeanfabre:
Hi,

 c# is not going anywhere anytime soon :) ECS is not for the mere mortals amongst us, it's a beast, it's completly out of any visual elements to help you, so only hardcode devs and studios with big budgets and AAA goals will afford ECS for their projects. Unity might in the coming years leverage the editor interface with ECS.

Bolt is in trouble, despite their amazing look and UI, because it basically doesn't perform as expected since everything is using reflections, they work on Bolt 2 which will create scripts, but their take is basically a visual c# editor which completely misses the point of visual scripting for artists and unity dev who don't know c#. So I don't see that as going anywhere in terms of concurrent as to what PlayMaker offers.

Visual scripting solution that generates scripts will always struggle with workflow because it takes extra compilation time to hit play, that's annoying and break the flow of development, even now I tend to just do things in PlayMaker just to avoid the compilation of a small change in a script. You get used to this and forget all the amazing things playmaker brings on the table, other then the visual aspect of it. Burst compiler may help, but only time will tell, right now, it's a big nop...

 It boils down to this:There is no perfect solution, but there is a sweet spot for everything and Alex nailed it, almost 10 years ago now!!! with its hybrid approach of visual fsm and c# custom actions. It's the best possible combination for NO performance penalty and visual scripting. But it means extensive support to provide custom actions, proxies for third parties etc, that's the downside and a real problematic one, which is why I think Unity can't provide its solution, because it knows about this above dilemma ( perfs vs man power ), they can't settle for any of the two. The only thing I could see happening is a custom action wizard, on steroids, that artists could use to maximize the reach for third parties without coding. But when I work on Cinemachine api, I understand this is isn't going to work across the board... some api are too complex for wizards.

Then, it's of course a matter of preferences, and it's great that so many publishers make their own visual scripting system, it's very positive and make things move forward.

Bye,

 Jean

Broken Stylus:

--- Quote from: jeanfabre on September 17, 2019, 05:00:35 AM ---The only thing I could see happening is a custom action wizard, on steroids, that artists could use to maximize the reach for third parties without coding.

--- End quote ---

What do you have in mind? Is this for Unity or Playmaker?
Since creating new actions is a roadblock for non-coders, do you think Playmaker might provide a solution to this in the future?

Fat Pug Studio:
I don't think custom action wizard will ever happen, though making actions is quite an easy feat, it's actually complex to make it automatized.

When you already have a script that does something and you have full access to it, making actions is dead simple with only basic coding knowledge.

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