Scratch like functionality

Hi,
is it possible to have a scratch like functionality, so we don`t need to create intermediate, not necessary objects in BB, that just hold some temporary value?

Hi @kshaja

No, it is not currently possible. This is mostly due to the design philosophy of Behavior. It is not meant to be a new visual scripting solution, instead, it is designed to control high-level events and efficiently handle simple tasks. Nothing prevents you from creating your custom node to do just that - however, the workflow is not going to be optimized to that need.

It is possible to make a BBV local (by setting “Exposed” to false), but you will still need to explicitly create it in the BB.

Hope this helps :slightly_smiling_face:

I was about to reply. I’d actually really like to see this simplified for cases like this and we may revisit this in the future. It’ll need design work and we’re busy with other priorities so it won’t be in the near future, but personally I’d like to see this type of workflow improved :slight_smile:

Hi, thanks for this quick answers :grinning:
and for this really great tool.

I understand fully that this is not a visual scripting tool, and I like it that way!

I have been using visual scripting tools like Virtools :face_holding_back_tears:
even before they were acquired by Dassault Systèmes 2005

I used some Unity solutions ( Antares Visual Scripting , Bolt) and of course now official one.

But they all have the problem that if you want to use it for simple things like:
int a=3;
or
a=3+b;
you had to create 3 or more blocks. Which is completely overhead.

And Behaviors are having this nice line of creating Action nodes, that can solve these usual and trivial tasks that arise in programming ( small math calculations )

Maybe you can create automatically, implicit BB variables, that exists but are not shown in BB ( save a lot of space in BB and time manually creating them ) for like Shanee wrote simplified cases…

I’m hopeful we can get something for it. :slight_smile:

Meanwhile, our team member @LauraRantonen is working on some changes to the Blackboard to allow you to group things together so you could make a group for “temp/local” blackboards. Also as Morgan said, you can make sure they’re not exposed so they won’t be seen and confuse people in the agent’s inspector.

Thank you @kshaja ! I fully understand the difficulties with Visual Scripting tools and I’m glad you see the merit in Behavior. I definitely want us to improve on ease of use where possible so please keep the feedback coming :slight_smile: