Your thoughts on a visual script system..
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Your thoughts on a visual script system..
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| Hi all, I am currently planning on writing a script system that is highly modular and visual. I kindof think about it as Legos or Digital Chips, where you have a bunch of independent black boxes which do their own little thing once activated. You could visualise a room in a game, where you can activate a lightswitch to turn on the lights. The switch and light is two seperate entities with specific functionality and uses. To make this work, I attach a simple Activation-controller to the switch, which in turn is connected to a controller connected to the light. When activated, the activation-controller sends out an activation signal to the light controller, which in turn activates and switches the light on. Simple example, but it can be expanded to do all sorts of things. The example above doesn't toggle the light or anything, it just turns the light on. So to improve on this, we can add a compare-controller to the chain. The lightswitch-activation-controller is connected to the compare-controller which in turn is connected to the light-controller. When you activate the compare-controller, it retrieves a value from a node (single value/string/boolean) and compares it to another nodes value (dummy node). The compare-controller have two outputs, True and False. One of these is connected to the light-controller. This could create a simple toggle function for the light switching. There are tons of different controllers one could make, but the compare-controller should be one of the most advanced ones to keep it simple enough to use. However, using these buildingblocks, more complex systems can be constructed. Now, the real design problem for me is making an intuitive way of integrating this into an editor, and making it easy to build complex behavior of all the entities in a scene. I've been thinking of several ways- 1. 2D tree structure on a page where you connect controllers to entities and assign inputs & outputs. 2. 3D boxes in 3D enviroment with 3D lines connecting controllers(box with name texture) and entities. (anyone remember duke nukem 3d - sector effectors and the like) 3. Morrowind/Oblivion constructionset way, with listboxes, treeviews and objectIDs. Could anyone contribute some thoughts on this? or perhaps ask questions if I confused the hell out of you :D |
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| Im guessing this isn't the right forum for this :D |
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| oh - I missed this one! Its a good idea, human brains are far more visually atuned feel free to mail me regarding this project |
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