As of today i’ve heard about the Visual Scripting program - Playmaker- i checked it out and watched all the video tutorials to get a real understanding and my impression is just wow so far.
Taking something as hard as scripting “for me” to make it that simple.
I’ve never been the biggest C# scripter. I might be able to pull off a script telling my player to simply move up and down. And that’s literally it. Do you think i would have it a lot easier with my “games” in the future if i ended up using “Playmaker”?
For me it looks like it hence it’s simplicity.
Trigger’s are easy
Values
Text scripts
player scripts etc etc etc.
All that is done so much easier in there instead of me keep asking the forums for how to make a ball hit the wall and let it bounce back and stick to the (paddle obj) again script.
It “Playmaker” worth it for a person who has little to no knowledge in scripting at all?
65$ is really cheap for such a program i would mean.
I use Playmaker when prototyping as it saves a lot of time and it’s easy to use. It’s great for working out the flow of a game, setting up quick button press routines for NGUI, testing out ideas, etc. After a while, once I know a particular flow works well then I start converting what I did in Playmaker into C# and remove the Playmaker components from the game. You can skip that step if you’re not super proficient in scripting.
I wouldn’t try to do anything really overly complicated with it but I love it for what I use it for, and highly recommend it. I also highly recommend learning C# over time as it will serve you much better in the long run.
I heard that while learning Playmaker your also gonna learn C# slowly.
Ofc i will try and learn it but as for now i find better oppertunities as i just can’t script and my games are gonna take twice as long.
I’ve seen people, mainly teams of artists, put out impressive looking games with simple mechanics by using playmaker during game jams. I did an intro to c# course so started dying to script but was convinced to try Playmaker. I like it for the stuff I haven’t learnt to script yet but I still use scripts for the stuff I do know as it’s easier to look at & step through for me.
Basically, if you understand the basics of coding but can’t actually code then it is probably going to be a good buy for you.
Hearthstone and Dreamfall Chapters are some high-profile games which use PlayMaker. Hearthstone used it to let the art team script things on their own, and Dreamfall used it for dialog.
I got Playmaker, and many times i tried to use it i got loops problems, also i don’t like the way block actions are displayed on the right panel. I baught Uscript basic, and this one is a real visual scripting as actiosn are displayed as blocks on the graph directly as well as all the variables you use.
I encourage you to buy one that is really more easy to use and more intuitive like Uscript or some others, but Playmaker even if it is the most complete is not the best to use.
Just to write down another perspective:
I bought playmaker thinking I wouldn’t bother learning programming at all. But the thing is, while making it easier, you also have to learn using Playmaker. At the end of the day I decided to learn programming, because for me it didn’t seem that much more complex to learn. Afterwards, I never used Playmaker again.
Very important: I’m not saying it’s a bad plugin. It can be very helpful if you don’t want to learn programming at all or if you want to make some sketches, but it’s certainly not a tool for everyone.
Agree. Some people are visual & struggle with coding but once they try something like playmaker where they get to visualise the scripting it makes it easier to understand how the scripts were working so they are able to go back to scripting & visualise what they are typing.
PlayMaker and uScript can complement each other. PM is a state machine, while uScript is a more generic solution. A PM dev talked about using uScript for events in PM, so there might be some examples on their forums.
If using either, I generally go with uScript personally. I write lower level code and turn into nodes for uScript.
Playmaker’s action browser is really great for learning all the basic programming functions and logic. The way it’s all cataloged and described makes it easy to find what you need. I have learned so much just by playing around with all the actions. But it gets messy and time consuming with complex mechanics, too much clicking and menus when you could write it all in one line code in C#.
Playmaker is AWESOME its WAY worth it- if you know where to look for additional actions like the wiki on their site here OR in the Ecosystem add-on- there isn’t really anything you can’t do with Playmaker- their forum is also very helpful
I tried all the visual scripting assets I could find for Unity and the two that really stand out that I continue to use in every project is Playmaker (Finite State Machines) and Behavior Designer (Behavior trees) they are well integrated with each other as well.
Uscript have the same actions, but the advantages is that you drop these actions in the flowgraph, visually you see all Unity functions, while in Playmaker you only see state blocks in the flowgraph and you must select one to see the actions on the right panel.
Uscript is lot more clear and natural, some UE4 Blueprints equivalent.
Yes flow Canvas seems visually as clear and intuitive to use as Uscript.
Yes, PlayMaker is indeed worth it if you have little scripting knowledge. Buy it, play with it for a week or two while watching tutorials and you will be amazed at what you can do without writing a line of code.
I would recommend PlayMaker because it was used in part to create HearthStone. I would also recommend it because you can modify the code nodes or write your own entirely. Even for experience coders like myself sometimes it’s fun and or useful to write little chunks of code you know you’ll need and then plug them into a playmaker state machine.
