We’re in doubt since the two products are very similar, therefore we would like to hear the community opinion towards these two great solutions for visual scripting in Unity. What are the biggest pros and cons of each one? Which one do you prefer and why?
There is no vs, as they don’t even target the same thing at all, PlayMaker is an FSM editor while uScript is a ‘replace text by blocks’ visual scripter with no FSM support at all, so its basically impossible to get more mutually exclusive 
the correct binding word there would be ‘with’ and you can use PlayMaker with uScript if you want.
if you want a vs, then you must do Universe vs Playmaker Universe vs uScript as it competes with both and offers more than any of the two offers feature wise 
You can create custom FSM nodes inside uScript (and follow the FSM paradigm by yourself). Performance wise, uScript is faster than Playmaker as what it does it generates real C# code behind the scenes.
You can yes, but you get the same unreadable code as with normal text and graphs. It kills the cleanness playmaker has.
Also when you do it, it will be at best as efficient as PlayMaker if not worse.
If you want the full flexibility + FSM then universe is definitely the winner. High performance and massive amount of nodes including full FSM.
Also just to warn you: don’t missunderstand ‘generates c# code’ as ‘generates fast and performant code’ cause it does a lot of overhead too and does not generate code that has any meaning for reusing or maintenance. It just means that it goes to any platform but thats where the benefit of this feature ends.
And that at the price that visual debugging is missing and only on the planned list although its a clear 1.0 feature for any visual coding technology as it is a feature thats vital for non master coders to even find out bugs in the flow and a feature that both Universe and PlayMaker offer while uScript is still lacking it.
in term of easy to get in , and coding side how you can manage to implement your own stuff , i think playmaker is good , do not know much about vizio, nor uScript , did not get a chance to use it really.
so maybe for non coder PM seem to be a more simple approach…maybe …^^
anyway it eat a lot of mono heap when on iOS …can really climb skyrocket if you start to multiply a lot of Fsm node ( do some AI stuff along several Fsm multiply by X number of entity and well XD…)… in your project …contrary to what you will get with regular script…so well…as many other will say, this is a trade off :)…
I did not test it back since latest update tho , so maybe this got better on this part by now.
I don’t use neither Playmaker or uScript, but i’ve tested both of them to prototype some gameplay ideas. Playmaker does a lots of reflections and runtime allocations/generation for their graphs, uScript generates c# code on the back, and it was faster for me. I’ve made my own FSM implementation and it works miles faster than any visual system out there.
Universe is much powerful in any cases or comparisions
And it’s free.
the ‘lite’ one is free, there is a payed one too.
So on that end neither of them is that different especialy as uscript is in public open beta
My 2 cents
PlayMaker offers a higher level, state machine structure that helps non-programmers build interesting interactive behaviors. You can sketch out a flow using plain English States (On, Off, Open, Closed, Idle, Attacking, Defending, Dead…) and plain English Events (turnOn, turnOff, attack, lostTarget, hitByEnemy…), building a clearly legible diagram of the high level behavior. Then you can add Actions to each State - essentially just like Behaviours in the Unity Inspector, but tied to a State; if you can use the Unity Inspector, you can use PlayMaker!
PlayMaker focuses on making the development, testing and maintainance of these state machines as user friendly and accessible as possible.
In my experience making rapid development tools for cross disciplinary teams, a visual state editor seems to be the sweet spot for the whole team. Non-programmers can create interactive content without learning low level programming principles, and programmers can make new components without worrying about artists/designers making spaghetti code that they’ll eventually have to re-write (visual coding is still coding). The idea is to empower each discipline to do what they’re good at - not to have them doing each others’ jobs (badly)!
So PlayMaker is not meant to turn an artist into a coder - it’s designed to empower an artist to realize their creative vision WITHOUT coding! Although we also have a lot of programmers use it just because it’s a fun way to develop!
Anyway, those are the design principles that drive the development of PlayMaker…
I also think PlayMaker works quite well with other visual scripting tools, e.g., the uScript guys have successfully made PlayMaker Actions using uScript, something I look forward to exploring further with them soon!
And it comes complete with the most fascinating user manual you’ll ever see.
Well to be honest, the one of the reasons i stopped working with Playmaker (Rain and others awesome unity extensions) is because i hate having critical parts of my project (in this case AI behaviors) depending on external plugins (specially when they don’t come with sources). I really hate to lose control, or encounter bugs that i cannot fix my self. I always want to control the inner deeps of my projects and what’s really hapening behind every single system that i code. There’s also others reasons as speed and runtime allocations problems, none of them can beat small hardcoded and well designed FSM system.
As a designer, who likes to pretend to code, I’ve realized that the manual for universe is really just the unity reference… … and thats a good thing I think.
Totally agree with this vision and there is more to game development (or development of any kind) than control and performance. Such issues as code clarity, maintainability and productivity have as huge an impact as any other aspects, although trade-offs have to be made at every stage.
The only issues so fare are with detailed documentation. You guys could improve the documentation, add more detailed tutorials and have better support for Javascript to ease the learning curve of new adopters.
Cheers
When I first started using PlayMaker, I loved it - I was able to get a 2D game I was toying around with up and going WAY FASTER than if I had coded it the normal Unity way.
Opt’d to buy uScript as well and now I’m loving that also - a different take on Unity programming, not related to FSMs at all - I love uScript also.
What I’m hoping to see, as a lot of other folks have requested is a synergy develop between the two scripting systems!
To be able to call uScripts from PlayMaker states would be hella awesome and vice versa.
In fact I’m loving the power these two visual scripting systems bring to Unity - at one point I was wishing I could develop my mainstream Windows applications at work using Unity with these visual systems but I would at least need my basic Windows Forms widgets etc., before I could get anywhere on that front. (I can’t see myself trying to make a native Unity TreeView or ComboBox control for example - ugh!)
But I can envision some really nice desktop applications all coded in a nice visual way - powerful stuff!
-Will
I’ve yet to really dive into it but I bought uScript … . it seemed to me playmaker would let you handle various states and so on which is probably okay mostly but it seemed uScript is a more general development tool which will let you do a lot more. The user interface is really nice and easy to understand.
what about universe is it compatible with unity? i ask because im a beginning programmer and this could help me to get mockups running and then i can correct and redo code as needed. my main question is this. does it add to much junk code? and can it call from other pre existing code to keep the coding minimal?
Assuming you’re talking about the documentation for Vizio, where on God’s green earth is this documentation. All I could find after hunting around for hours was a bunch of low quality videos without sound, not good enough for a product that cost $150.
IMHO PlayMaker is the tool of choice and uScript looks good but haven’t used it yet and I hear that PlayMaker and uScript will play together well in the near future.
Paul
Hence, the word fascinating.
I’m waiting for Universe to get its docs together as well before I bother trying to use it - I’m a stickler about documentation.
I would even posit that UT should place a standard on its Asset Store developers that they have to match the standard that Unity has set with its own documentation.
I’m very pleased with PlayMaker, uScript and ex2D tools and their level of support documentation. Moving forward you won’t see me buying it, unless it at least matches the standard these other folks / companies have set.
PlayMaker is awesome and as I stated earlier, when I started using uScript, it was a refreshing difference from PlayMaker. Not so much that it was better, but it was just a different approach - and just as >liberating< as PlayMaker.
They both do very well with what they do - hence the typical “hey I want both PlayMaker and uScript in my peanut butter…”
The fact that I can program my games now using C#, Javascript and visually using PM or uS to me makes Unity a hella powerful development platform PERIOD! That’s sort of why I wished I could even develop desktop apps with it.
I would love to use Unity to develop a multimedia video player app - where I can open multiple video windows; slide the panes around (let’um snap together or bounce off each other using physics), rotate and resize them with ease etc.
Prob is, Unity isn’t a very flexible video player (only a few formats supported. I need the full gamut of video formats like what KMPlayer supports for example) and Unity also want to load each video, I need them streamed (not too many systems can handle opening 12 windows of 1.5gig .mp4 video files etc.)
Still, I see serious potential moving forward with Unity and these scripting systems - as Unity get more powerful, I can imagine, the type of apps I can develop will expand as well!
-Will