So I’m looking at buying Playmaker. How many of you use it? How much faster is it? Would you recommend it?
I have used Playmaker to design of the features for my game, and I highly recommend it if you are more of a visual artist…
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Playmaker is a big and nice “Fsm” system more or less.
How much faster is really depending on what you have habit to do, usual coder may prefer or think that they better write all etc …etc…
Anyway I used it at very beginning and if can summarize in couple sentence my impression at that time well :
- If you are not familiar yet with unity api, it is a good way to learn using that tool.
- Debug is very nice when you want control your states logic.
- It make code or logic stuff very “readable and understandable” for almost everybody.
- The fact you can write your own “Action” in playmaker make it very convenient to fit on specifics for your game.
- If you work with designer guys that will be certainly more efficient for them to design gameplay that way.
- Even if you are coder , this is a good way also to prototype in a “rock and roll” way without planning much/at all in advance , then all the logic flow you put in place can giveyou an overall good “implementation” picture of things you want or have to do for a product release if you don’t plan to let playmaker where it is…( believe me this can be handy before write code when you get some client asking for XXX iteration of a proto , and you can even share logic graph with him…)
- You can obviously learn script from reading built playmaker actions.
So depending where you are in Unity journey, this can be a good investment.
On the cons side , well using it for everything may give you quite a bit of overhead here and here, Fsm are not always easy or fit a specific implementation for some part of your game.
stacking of lot of action sometimes to get X or Y behavior may simply make you feel that you better to go with a simple script instead …( instead of bloated action in inspector and spagetti block logic ^^ )
for me that’s more a matter of preference first and also ( in case you are not the only one working on project ) if the tools can be beneficial in your pipeline and for people working with you.
I used it most of the time when I was in need to provide something easy to manage for a gameplay designer to work.
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I bought playmaker when it was on sale and It was really nice, but I found myself finding that simply coding scripts was a lot faster than using playmaker, but I can see myself using play maker to make prototypes and such.
You should probably only use it if you aren’t familiar with the Unity API (as Giyomu stated), but overall is a nice thing to have.
For my current project, Playmaker and Mecanim combined will be one hell of a combo…
Its priceless if you can’t code well or fast, personally i use it nearly 100%. It has a generic get and set property action to access functions and variables in scripts that you or others have made that is pretty nice and I’ve been able to use that to access things i buy from the asset store and manipulate them with playmaker actions.
Strong coders might use it for ai or prototyping but i doubt they would like the overhead and end up wanting to do it themselves and control the optimizing more.
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I’ve found it exremely useful but only when combined with scripting. There are many things you can use it for that are just faster (for me) than coding, but for more complex behavior it gets a little tedious… So i save it for easy tasks like find and position game objects, level loading from ngui button press, quick prototype behavior, destroy game object if too far away, etc.
Edit: Also, the error handling by the PM team is excellent. I have yet to experience a null reference error, even when i know the fsm wasnt setup properly by me.
First started using Unity with Playmaker to build my small behaviors.
But with time, learned C# and the small scripts provided with the plugins to build the graph are a very good resource to learn C# with Unity.
Finally removed the plugins after 3-4 month.
It was 2 years ago I guess? Then I am sure the plugins got more features since.
Also very good support on their forum, I really appreciated it :
I also think Playmaker is one of those plugins all GameDesigner should learn on a game production to get their idea on table faster before clean C# scripting.
With custom actions (I’ve written over 100 custom actions from simple to complex usages) it can do quite a bit to reduce code overhead and gives you unlimited re-usability as you can use an FSM as many times as you want (templates, etc…). I think many underestimate the power of a good FSM. IMO visual editors will become more and more the norm. I’ve been using PlayMaker for my entire game and it’s nearly completed. A lot of my complex FSMs would’ve taken multiple scripts and thousands of lines of code to properly accomplish. The support is also awesome. As far as overhead PlayMaker is extremely lightweight and the performance hit from using it is nearly nothing; bad coding causes bad performance in the same way a bad FSM will cause bad performance so same standards apply, but it’s much harder to screw up an FSM then it is coding.
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I’ve used playmaker a couple of times and once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s a FANTASTIC tool, especially if you’re a slow coder like I am. I’ll probably be taking the plunge and buying it next week.
One of the best tools on the store, with plenty of documentation and tutorials to get you going. Definitely worth the price.
I’ve always assumed this was for artists only who didn’t want to learn programming. It seems some people are saying this can be a usefully tool for programmers also, you can use this and code on your own as needed. Is this correct? Would this tool boost the productivity of programmers also, or am I misreading this?
There are plenty of things that playmaker can do fast (less than a dozen clicks) that it would take half an hour or more to make a script for and you can use the PlayMaker interface to easily link it up with other playmaker systems in the game. You can also make you own scripts, then call functions and change variables from the playmaker interface in a matter of a few clicks.
I plan to use Playmaker for the stuff I don’t want to code, like UIs/menus and other stuff. While I can do it, it doesn’t interest me as much as gameplay and AI. Playmaker allows me to not worry about that aspect.
Well maybe I should give it a shot. Rather impulsive purchase for me, but isn’t too expensive. Plus the documentation actually looks pretty good when I was checking it out earlier, and that is usually a peeve of mine.
I barely suggest stuff to other people. But Playmaker is awesome!
Many updates and bug fixes on a regular basis, a lively support forum and Alex is really a nice guy. Oh and did I mention that the updates are free?
Playmaker itself is really easy to grasp. Took me a couple of hours to understand it after watching the basic tutorials. No need to learn tons of code.
I was surprised that you can produce sophisticated and complex stuff with Playmaker alone.
The current price is really a bargain for what you get. So go and grab it!
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Hey guys,
I have a lot of GUI windows with different hierarchies and I’d like to get it categorized or at least get some order in this system. I thought of a finite state machine where the state represents the GUI windows and transitions are the different buttons that lead you to another GUI window (state).
Is Playmaker capable of doing something like this with a bit of coding?
I’ve used it for my entire game so far. I have written something like 300 custom actions for various asset store assets, which is actually awesome to be able to do. I like it very much and performance wise I see no difference in raw coding. I coded by physic collision controller for my characters then I did the same in PlayMaker and they gave same performance so to me it seams perfectly fine to use; the overhead is little to none and it’s massively easier to debug.
I can’t stress this enough. Alex is absolutely awesome. He worked with me personally, reviewed my project, discovered some PlayMaker bugs, and promptly fixed. Support is absolutely awesome.
Yes, my UI is done entirely with PlayMaker. I do use CoherentUI for a HTML5/CSS/JS based UI solution, but it’s basically the same concept. I have a FSM state for each menu and each menu (FSM state) has events for each button that when fired sent to the next FSM state (new menu items). Also works fine for my HUD of course.
This is pretty simple and straightforward with Playmaker. It’s easy to stay organized with the visual FSM states system it has.
Playmaker is a great, extensible FSM. Just buy it. I’ve been a pro game coder for 20 years and Playmaker is certainly not ‘just for numpties who can’t code’.
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