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Author Topic: Quality Of Life improvement suggestions in Playmaker  (Read 2506 times)

Lane

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Quality Of Life improvement suggestions in Playmaker
« on: September 09, 2013, 02:19:08 PM »
I think it would be good to start a healthy discussion of things you think could be improved in Playmaker as far as making it easier to use, more accessible, full-fledged or helpful to your workflow. What do you think would make things faster, easier, more convenient or useful? Mostly regarding the UI and Features.

Tips/Tricks/Things I do that I think could be improved:
I tend to use the Comment action a lot these days to keep the FSM's looking tidy. If the State Description could be turned off so it didn't show in the FSM view then I would use it more often, or if you could toggle that it is a mouse-over description that would be nice. Lots of options there.

I dislike using the State descriptions because the text field you type in cannot get bigger and are cumbersome to edit because you have to click in them, scroll down and can only see 3 lines of brief text in the field. I'd like to see these scaleable.


I would really like if actions could be grouped and then collapsed as a group. GUI states tend to get pretty huge for me and it gets difficult to see whats going on sometimes.

I sometimes create empty states for the sole purpose of making notes in various places in the FSM so I don't have to break the default size of the states that are wired up. This helps summarize the FSM without using the clunky FSM description field that is easily overcluttered.

It would be sweet to have a low profile "Note" you could place somewhere in the FSM like we do States and point an optional arrow to something. Even better if these could collapse as well, you could place small notes in the FSM and collapse them so the text isnt always shown and taking up space.

I make an empty game object called Design (or something) now and add various notes, problems and solutions in there as well as conceptualize ideas in it before implementing them. This is like a rudimentary changelog and tracker for critical items I've changed. This is one huge FSM with areas for each particular system I've created or plan to create, I put the problems/bugs on the bottom and shuffle things around to keep related information near each other. I'd love to see more along the lines of supporting this type of documenting system.

Editor Popup boxes for tutorials or descriptions would be a great addition, I'd even use them to store relevant ideas or things I'm worried about regarding a particular system that I cant effectively fit into the GDD FSM.
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escpodgames

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Re: Quality Of Life improvement suggestions in Playmaker
« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2013, 10:05:12 PM »
Sweet list!

One of the things I'd love to have is more colors, assuming artist tent to use Playmaker due to lack of coding knowledge, the visual communication of state machines is very important. The 8 colors (if you could default) are great to heap separate components of a system but there is never enough. Being able to add custom colors to a project would be amazing.