What is the best way to go for visual scripting? FSM??
Playmaker
The answer depends on your strengths, what you want to learn, and what you want to build. Give some more info and we can respond with better answers.
None, learn to program. What do these programs teach u anyways but to be lazy you cant actually make a decent game with these additions not atleast to my knowledge…
I can program in Java, VB, and a little javascript. I bought Playmaker for $50. Looks great. The other 2 look like there in beta.
I’ve tried playmaker I wont lie its cool but at the end of the day it all comes down to you needing to do actual programming
I agree with this. In all honesty, I don’t see a point in visual scripting. Not trying to put down the companies that put a lot of hard work into making their product, but I find this approach to programming rather lazy. I will probably never use a visual scripting editor. Call it old fashioned if you want. Personal preference.
Wish me luck then 
I know minimal programming but never learned it in-depth enough to make a game, I can’t wrap my head around all the syntax and it’s just un-fun in general for me. However with Playmaker I’m making huge progress and my game is running 100% using FSMs in Playmaker…
no, I have to disagree and propose that for visual thinkers and artists that can grasp advanced logical concepts and systems visual coding like in universe is very useful for me.
Playmaker and Uscript are limiting though. (I think) I own all three just to be fair!
I don’t understand where the contention that visual scripting is lazy comes from. Personal preference is fine, and whatever works is my motto, I like all sorts of tools and I’m a fairly crappy coder in an die or in labview, but I don’t use visual scripting to avoid learning reference docs, I like being able to see constructors as inputs and love visually debugging.
Because your not doing any of the work yourself, your letting the program do it for you instead of hand coding it.
This topic made me check out Antares Universe and I gotta admit the possibilities which the program can create seems endless. If you can think of it the program seems to be capable to do it. I’m gonna toy with this for a bit because it is fun. I wanna see what i can make…
to answer this I’d go with Antares Universe
Seems to be a really good system…
I agree with you that when you totally rely on prebuilt actions and components then something is missing from the core concepts of development, I would guess that for some games a lot of possibility can be built from those pre made components. I’m interested in games and other kinds of apps as well, so thats why I wanted the ability to call things directly from the unity reference with universe.
OK its official i cant use Universe to save my life. This thing is supposed to make it easier to make games? in what world? I can program what I want to do but trying to figure out this stupid “Visual Scripting Editor” is getting annoying.
I love playmaker. If you are not a coder I recommend it. If you are a coder I recommend it aswell actually because you are not limited to playmaker actions but can extend them to your liking. You can use playmaker as a good flowchart of your game and code the more intricate stuff yourself.
Yuck, those things for me are just crap, i find it more complex then just coding it…
Playmaker is a excellent tool for complex interactions as well as the minor things, what is appealing with these tools is they can reduce code redundancy, Increase productivity and allow you to spend less time in debug mode, Which are good reason’s to purchase these products.
Anybody who might remark with saying these tools make for lazy programmers; They may only be partly correct but it’s like saying Unity is for lazy Game Developers you should design the Game Engine from Scratch!, Or that the #C framework is preferred over UnityScript or perhaps that we should get the job done using C++ or even Assembly? after all programming languages are just tools.
If the tool is used and gets the game to market sooner whatever inherit experience one might possess then by all means use the thing.
The Gamer who buys the game won’t give a damn all they care about is performance and gameplay
Agreed, it’s the equivalent of claming Dreamweaver is for lazy web developers when they should code everything from scratch in HTML. Sure you can do it but in the end it’s the result that matters, there’s no reason to create extra work for the sake of “integrity” or some kind of programmer’s pride. In this case if straight coding is actually more natural than using a visual editor then more power to you, whichever method is more efficient is the method you should use
it is i agree with this 100 percent
thats not afair comparison because with unity you still have to do alot from scratch to get the game working with the visual scripting editor you just push a button and connect states and you have just made your player walk…
it is a fair comparison, because I’m not sure you know what you’re talking about anymore.
not about programming but about what these tools do exactly, as I don’t think you’ve given them a fair shake, and you’re being pretentious.
anyhow it doesn’t really matter anyway, to each his own as you said before.
As someone who learned coding long before there were such things, I absolutely love my Playmaker. I spent years learning to code in languages that are basically obsolete now. I have no desire to spend my time learning another language. However it depends on what you want out of development. If you want fast paced, high quality game, Playmaker might not be the best thing. But if you are making something that isn’t a performance hog, such as a casual puzzler or even a turn based game, playmaker is a godsend. Especially if you are a single person operation with slightly more money than time.
I looked at this recently and it came down to the understanding that uScript and Universe are visual scripting systems whereas Playmaker is a visual state manager. uScript and Universe are basically trying to cut out scripting entirely from your development whereas Playmaker is only really trying to visually replace a portion of the script you would write.
I tried uScript PLE and while I really wanted to like working in a visual scripting language, it just adds a lot of extra process to get simple things, with all sorts of variable nodes and such. I ended up with a huge graph that did very little. Since I am a programmer, the same script in C# was tiny.
However Playmaker I did buy because it really is a valuable tool. Playmaker helps you visualize the states of an object and see what transitions take you from state to state. It will let you add some simple logic with their built in actions, but more than likely you’ll end up writing your own code for additional work that happens on each state or additional actions that cause state transitions. Having played with Playmaker for about a week, I can’t imagine making a full game using it without also writing some code as well.
At the end of the day, as with a lot of things in game development, there is no right answer here. Some people love visual scripting, some hate it, and some just pay no attention to it.