playMaker

Author Topic: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions  (Read 2785 times)

Gua

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v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« on: January 16, 2021, 03:40:49 AM »
Since we don't have a lot of info regarding v1.9.1.f7. Only this change log.
https://hutonggames.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W311

I've decided to update Playmaker in my current project and took couple hours to play with it and figure out what exactly do we got. If you don't understand where I got access to Playmaker v1.9.1.f7. I bought Playmaker trough Hutong Games site and it seems that they decided to give those direct buyers access to new version earlier than to asset store buyers.

Overall impressions
I will say right of the bat, that I'm impressed with this update. Not a single bad decision was made and new actions and improvements will be a huge productivity booster. It doesn't happen that often with other software. Like new Asset Store is still inferior compared to old asset store and has a lot of problems. I still don't like new prefab workflow in Unity etc. So often in other software upgrades change something to be inferior. I'm glad that is not the case here.

Installation
Upgrading Playmaker in my current big project went very well. No errors, no corrupted globals. I haven't extensively playtested my game after upgrade to see if some connections broke. I do plan to do this later.

Workflow bugs are gone
Two annoying bugs that have been hurting my productivity are gone. I'm talking about those bugs.
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=20174.0
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=21701.msg95269#msg95269

Productivity booster
I feel like this is the core focus of this update.
"Exposes variable/events as Outputs in Run FSM" This has been a long awaited feature. No more need for hacky unintuitive solutions. Run FSM is now way more powerful and I'll probably start to use it even more, especially considering that there are other improvements related to templates.

"Added native Tween actions." When I originally saw that line, I didn't pay much attention to it. But when I looked at those actions I was really impressed. They are very smartly designed and some tasks that took 3 actions and couple minutes to setup will now need only 1 action and 10-20 seconds. Some actions also have their own interactive gizmos.

I've always associated tween actions with movement/rotation. But those new tween actions work with sound, transparency, camera etc.



There are also other changes that should boost your productivity.

Editor performance
One major performance issue with Playmaker that bugs me, is that when I have lots of FSMs on one object and that object is selected, editor performance becomes really poor. You can read about that issue here
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=20293.0

And I know, that this is kind of Unity's fault, not Playmaker fault. But with this update, we got new look for PlaymakerComponents. And I love that minimalistic look.


That new look gave me hope, that we will get some editor performance improvement for the cases that I've described before.

When I opened FSM on gameobject with lots of FSMs and tried to drag states around it looked like that it runs at 5 fps. So originally I thought that performance is as bad as it was before. But when I decided to type something in action field like set string, it felt much more responsive than before. Unfortunately this is where good news ends.

At the moment I constantly bump into random Playmaker/Unity freezes when I'm working with FMSs. I mean, editor becomes unresponsive for like a second or two. I didn't pin point all the cases when this happens so it's hard to reproduce. At the moment I know couple reproduceable cases.

It happens when I add new FSM component to game object. Unity literally freezes for 2 seconds. Delay also happens when I copy-paste FSM component and hit Edit. This happens only once. For this case. I can even restart unity and this will not happen for this specific FSM component.

There also noticeable delay when I remove Playmaker FSM from some game objects.

New bugs
Here's the list of bugs I've found.
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=23311.0
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=23310.0
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=23308.0
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=23315.0

And one major bug is that drag and drop for actions is a bit broken. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This is the biggest downside of this update.
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=23314.0


As I've said before. I've only used new Playmaker for couple hours, but so far I really like this update. I hope they release v1.9.1.f7 on asset store soon. I really want to see more discussion around v1.9.1.f7.
« Last Edit: January 16, 2021, 10:32:02 AM by Gua »

djaydino

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #1 on: January 16, 2021, 09:04:26 AM »
Hi.
Thanks for the feedback.
It will be really useful for Alex to get as much feedback as possible.

Also if people are interested in testing beta versions you can always ask access to Alex, Jean or me.

Alex Chouls

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #2 on: January 16, 2021, 03:07:05 PM »
This is really great feedback - thanks!

I hope to get a patch build out asap with some fixes!

Have you tried the new PlayMakerControls component? It should be useful when you have multiple FSM components on a GameObject, allowing you to collapse the individual components. There is an editor cost as long as an inspector is open, but I'm looking into ways to minimize it.

More documentation for the new features is coming soon...

Gua

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #3 on: January 17, 2021, 05:30:18 AM »
This is really great feedback - thanks!

I hope to get a patch build out asap with some fixes!

Have you tried the new PlayMakerControls component? It should be useful when you have multiple FSM components on a GameObject, allowing you to collapse the individual components. There is an editor cost as long as an inspector is open, but I'm looking into ways to minimize it.

More documentation for the new features is coming soon...
I did tried it, but I didn't find it useful for my workflow. I would love to collapse all those FSMs and get my performance back, but I need at least one edit button visible, cause I use playmaker in a locked state. I can even say that when I select game object with lots of FSMs I usually don't look for specific fsm in the inspector, I hit edit button on any fsm on that object and then look for FSM I need in this list. Cause it's faster.


So if PlayMakerControls was able to solve that issue, I would defiantly use it and it would greatly improve my workflow. And it doesn't need to do a lot.

A solution that comes to mind is to have drop down list with all fsms in this game object in PlayMakerControls and once you select a fsm from that list it will open it in Playmaker.

If this will be implemented, then I would love to see editor option that will allow to automatically add PlayMakerControls component to any game object where I create FSM, if there isn't one already there, cause I would want to use it everywhere to be able to never "uncollapse" FSM components.
« Last Edit: January 17, 2021, 05:32:17 AM by Gua »

LordHorusNL

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #4 on: January 17, 2021, 04:16:53 PM »
I've also been testing out this new release and although I like some of the new additions. I do think that it's become lot less easy to quickly "read" the actions in states because of a few small changes.

Things like changing the border color between actions to black instead of white which makes the difference between actions a lot less clear and more difficult to see. And the fact that some action now take up just a little less space in the state hierarchy.

And the fact that the "comment" action can no longer be used as a blank separator between actions to break things up. This is probably a unity thing though and not because of PlayMaker.



The left one to me is a lot easier to read.

PlayMakerControls does come in handy though.

Louis.Law

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #5 on: January 18, 2021, 12:33:51 AM »
Failed to copy package file to Assets/PlayMaker/Editor/zh-CN/PlayMakerEditorResources.resources.dll

I got this error message when I Install 1.9.1.f7 and could not install it successfully.

djaydino

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #6 on: January 18, 2021, 06:32:50 AM »
Hi.
Which Unity version?

Did you upgrade an existing project or a new project?

Did get the package from the asset store or direct link (if you purchased on hutinggames.com)

Hayato

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #7 on: January 19, 2021, 10:29:12 AM »
Hi.
Which Unity version?

Did you upgrade an existing project or a new project?

Did get the package from the asset store or direct link (if you purchased on hutinggames.com)

I meet the same problem both in 2019.4 & 2020.1 from asset store.
And the problem happens sometimes when we try to upgrade new version of PlayMaker , like this post :
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=22398.msg98127#msg98127

My way is:
In project window left-click menu select "show in explorer" to locate -
Assets/PlayMaker/Editor/[[YourLoaction]]/PlayMakerEditorResources.resources.dll
Then delete it directly and install playmaker again will be fine .
It's easy to solve but annoying .

Alex Chouls

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #8 on: January 19, 2021, 12:26:56 PM »
This is really great feedback - thanks!

I hope to get a patch build out asap with some fixes!

Have you tried the new PlayMakerControls component? It should be useful when you have multiple FSM components on a GameObject, allowing you to collapse the individual components. There is an editor cost as long as an inspector is open, but I'm looking into ways to minimize it.

More documentation for the new features is coming soon...
I did tried it, but I didn't find it useful for my workflow. I would love to collapse all those FSMs and get my performance back, but I need at least one edit button visible, cause I use playmaker in a locked state. I can even say that when I select game object with lots of FSMs I usually don't look for specific fsm in the inspector, I hit edit button on any fsm on that object and then look for FSM I need in this list. Cause it's faster.


So if PlayMakerControls was able to solve that issue, I would defiantly use it and it would greatly improve my workflow. And it doesn't need to do a lot.

A solution that comes to mind is to have drop down list with all fsms in this game object in PlayMakerControls and once you select a fsm from that list it will open it in Playmaker.

If this will be implemented, then I would love to see editor option that will allow to automatically add PlayMakerControls component to any game object where I create FSM, if there isn't one already there, cause I would want to use it everywhere to be able to never "uncollapse" FSM components.

You can click the FSM name in PlayMakerControls to open it in the main editor.

There is a new FSM Controls window that works the same as PlayMakerControls (without the component). It has an option to add the PlayMakerControls component to the selected GameObject. Not sure if that helps with your workflow...

Broken Stylus

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #9 on: January 21, 2021, 10:11:06 AM »
I'm reading the long list of "newness" right now and it's soooo appetizing. It's like Christmas 2.0.  ;D

Gua

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #10 on: January 21, 2021, 10:42:28 AM »
I'm reading the long list of "newness" right now and it's soooo appetizing. It's like Christmas 2.0.  ;D
I want to add some new info. After I've started using Playmaker I've discovered a lot of serious bugs. https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?board=23.0

At the moment I'm not sure that it was I good idea to upgrade, cause with new version of Playmaker I'm afraid to edit my old "code" cause new version might break it. Mostly because of this bug.
https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=23343.0

And some of my old logic got "corrupted"
« Last Edit: January 21, 2021, 08:29:27 PM by Gua »

Broken Stylus

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Re: v1.9.1.f7 First impressions
« Reply #11 on: January 22, 2021, 04:41:40 AM »
Fall back onto the latest 1.9.0x then; it's more cautious than trying to force your way through a major update that you may not need that much.