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PlayMaker is on sale - worth a buy?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by anwserman, Apr 19, 2013.

  1. anwserman

    anwserman

    Joined:
    Feb 13, 2012
    Posts:
    36
    I noticed PlayMaker is on sale right now, and I was wondering what other devs think of the tool. I'm a fairly decent programmer in the .Net field, and I've always liked knowing how things get done in my project vs. blindly having at it. From what I've read, Playmaker is a visual FSM - basically, I could input my hand-drawn character control flow charts into the tool.

    But that's the thing I don't get - how does it work behind the scenes? Let's say my character controller is idle and then the user jumps, then lands again. How does one go about mapping those actions to my character controller? I'm just wondering, as I'm gearing up on creating my character controller in my app.
     
  2. willemsenzo

    willemsenzo

    Joined:
    Nov 15, 2012
    Posts:
    585
    I have no idea about how PlayMaker works but I would say if you know how to program the best choice is to do it yourself. It's not as hard as you would think but every process has some kind of a learningcurve attached to it. I started using Unity without any programming experience and now one year later I feel pretty comfortable to program things myself. You definitely have an advantage if you already know C#.
     
  3. MurDocINC

    MurDocINC

    Joined:
    Apr 12, 2013
    Posts:
    265
  4. makeshiftwings

    makeshiftwings

    Joined:
    May 28, 2011
    Posts:
    3,350
    I've found it useful. Some things are much easier to express as visual state machines than code. I've found it particularly useful for doing things like NPC AI behavior where FSM's are a natural fit. Being able to see the state machines run in realtime while you're playing the game is very useful; it saves a lot of time that would otherwise be spent debugging or looking through logs. I still do most of my game logic in code though.