Using Playmaker alongside Corgi Engine, recommendations to make it work?

[bartolomey_wong]

Hello guys!

I'm starting learning Playmaker. I want to use it alongside Corgi Engine. I heard it's possible, but need some work. Can you give me some tips, recommendations, best practices?

On the forums and on the official Playmaker YouTube channel, I didn't find any info regarding that, only some questions about particular things with Corgi + Playmaker.

I wonder what a guy needs in general to make such a setup work.

I mean, the main stuff would be handled by Corgi, and then some custom scripts (or whatever) I would create in Playmaker and somehow connect to Corgi as components or something.

Thanks in advance!

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

 you are right, you will need some scripting to create custom actions and component to enable playmaker and corgi to work together.

it's not trivial and usually, this is something initiated by the third party, have you contacted them? you can cc me to your mail, usually, I give them a head start and a couple of examples on custom actions and then playmaker support becomes available by the third party developer themselves which is the ideal situation, unfortunatly, we can not support every third parties...

Let me know how it goes,

Bye,

Jean

[bartolomey_wong]

Hello Jean,

Thanks for letting me know! I just sent out an email to a Corgi Engine developer, we will see. But I doubt he would make those custom actions: I found questions about Playmaker in his forums and discord, and he knows about your asset, but isn't interested in learning it or working with it or helping to make his engine work with it.

In any case, I will update you with his response.

Actually, I thought that I could use Playmaker with Corgi without involving heavy custom development like that. Isn't it possible to create a custom script in Playmaker and then add it to a gameobject to make it work. Doesn't it work like that?

Also I asked about it on Reddit, and some experienced user told me this:

The Get Property / Set Property in the action browser is your best bet,

You can talk to other non playmaker assets that way.

So doesn't this approach work to use Plaumaker scripts or actions or whatever with Corgi? I mean, Corgi is the framework, working inside Unity. I just add custom components from it to my gameobjects. Can't I add Playmaker-built scripts to gameobjects easily like that?

Thanks!

[bartolomey_wong]

Hi,

 you are right, you will need some scripting to create custom actions and component to enable playmaker and corgi to work together.

it's not trivial and usually, this is something initiated by the third party, have you contacted them? you can cc me to your mail, usually, I give them a head start and a couple of examples on custom actions and then playmaker support becomes available by the third party developer themselves which is the ideal situation, unfortunatly, we can not support every third parties...

Let me know how it goes,

Bye,

Jean

So I've got a response from Playmaker team, here it is:

At this point I don't have plans to support Playmaker, or any other third party. At the scale of the engine, that'd be too big a task to maintain compatibility with their constant changes, and I'm just one person. Furthermore, plenty of studios already use both (or various other visual programming solutions). The engine is a C# framework, built according to industry standards, and its API is public and offers enough hooks for these solutions to interact with it.

Do you think you could work with that, Corgi being C# and open with APIs?

But that's for the future. I mean, at this stage, right now, would it be possible for me to work with Playmaker and Corgi like I described in my previous message?

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

yeah, I worked with More Mountains and Exitgmes to support Photon engine network solution for their High road engine and it was unfortunately never really a shared effort. It doesn't take away the quality of their production though!

Your best option is to make custom actions and custom component written in c#, using only get/set properties to make a full project is not recommended nor enough to cover all possibilities and needs. Custom actions is better and safer across the board. In these cases, I usually offer my help to produce these actions and I have a special rates if you are ok to share back the work to the playmaker community, 90% of the wiki content has been done to support third party assets.

Pm me if you are interested,

Bye,

Jean

[bartolomey_wong]

Hey Jean,

Yes, I would love to know your special rates, and I'm happy to share the work with the community. Frankly, I'm very surprised there is no integration of Playmaker with Corgi at this stage, since they are both incredibly popular assets, and I kinda expected for them to play nice together already

But it seems I understand what you mean about 'not being a shared effort'.

So I'm open to discussion about creating those custom actions. Do I need to provide you any details about things I plan to do with Playmaker for my current project, or how does it work?

Anyway, will be looking forward to your reply to take things further.

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

 email sent with details

 Bye,

Jean

[bartolomey_wong]

Hey Jean,

Thank you! Got it, will reply soon

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

Ok

 Bye,

Jean

[stanimal]

I have been using Playmaker with Corgi for a while using get/set properties from the individual components.  I agree that for a finished product this probably wouldn't cut it, but I've been able to interreact with many/most components for my prototyping purposes without learning any C# using Playmaker. It takes some serious experimentation and extra FSM's/Global actions, but it can be done (again, for prototyping).

This weekend I finally took the plunge and started working with custom actions and I am so excited about the possibilities after getting my first one to work.

I'd consider paying for (and sharing w/community) custom Playmaker actions for some of the Corgi features and I would welcome an email with info on roughly what the costs might be. 

Biggest impact of switching to the custom action approach is that I simply slap my FSM component on a playable character and have access to get/set and more on any Corgi component I want without going in and relinking to the specific component on the subsequent players. This makes adding 2v2 and experimenting with new character types SOOOOOOOOOO much easier and I kick myself for not learning this sooner.

@Jean: Shoot me an email about how you price custom actions, not sure I'll go forward, but I'm genuinely interested. If you need more info on what I'd want/need just let me know and I can put together a list/outline.

Either way, Playmaker has been such a blessing to my life these last few years and I really appreciate it. I've learned Unity and now am starting to grasp C# and wouldn't have gotten there starting without your asset.  Thanks!

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

 Great pm sent

Bye,

Jean