Notgames Forum

Yes, the main reason why we use Unity is its multi-platform capacity. I still consider Quest3D to be a more powerful programming system, for people like me. Thanks to the visual programming add-on Antares Universe, I can finally tackle more sophisticated projects in Unity. But this add-on is limited by Unity's (almost) absent real-time interpretation (everything needs to be compiled before it can be run and that seriously limits the directness required for a lot of artistic creativity).

I have actually designed a real-time programming concept (when discussing such a feature in a Unity beta group). I should find a programmer and make a working mock-up of this concept to see if it would actually work. It was specifically designed with Unity in mind, though. So it's probably not as ideal as it could be. Though I think it would make programming a lot more fluent -and a lot more fun- for many people.

I'd be very interested in hearing your idea. Would you be willing to share it on this forum.

Same here.

Here's the sketches I made. Hope they are comprehensible:
(remember this was conceived with Unity in mind, as an alternative to scripting)

http://tale-of-tales.com/tales/LogicGraph/ideas01.html
Overview of the concept.

http://tale-of-tales.com/tales/LogicGraph/ideas02-opendoor.html
How a typical game interaction would be graphed, described at the top of the page.

http://tale-of-tales.com/tales/LogicGraph/ideas03-NinjaStar.html
A small game suggested as a challenge for this system, described at the bottom.

Nice & clean concept .. one that could easily translate into the viewport as well. I took the liberation to make the "Key" a child of the Player ( as boolean variable )



- Once you select object(s) in the viewport the child nodes are shown.
- When dragging nodes outside of their parent, their 3D position is calculated relative to the projection plane.
- When you roll-over the "Door.Open" animation node, you'd instantly see the animation being previewed in the scene
- Etc

Very nice!
I was definitely considering a one-to-one connection with the structure of the scene hierarchy in Unity but had not thought about representing the logic in the viewport. This is very exciting!

We might still need a more abstracted view, for logic that is not directly connected to 3D objects.
Unless perhaps we show abstract "objects" in the viewport as well. That could get messy. But might be easier to navigate than the current hierarchy + inspectors.

Maybe the logic graph can even be three-dimensional!

What if we consider comic strip language? Logic connected to objects could be represented as thought bubbles…

Could you give a example of a script that doesn't belong to any object?

Well, of course, in Unity, every bit of logic is connected to an object in the hierarchy. But sometimes there's a lot of logic. And sometimes the object is just an empty object (and thus invisible). Logic that is primarily calculations, arrays, loops and conditions. An A.I. system would be an extreme example, or any sort of Finite State Machine.

But as I mentioned, perhaps elements of abstract logic could also be presented in the 3D space as objects that are not rendered in the game but only visible in the scene viewport (or you could simply put them on a layer that the game camera doesn't render). It might be very intuitive actually to manipulate logical "objects" in a similar way as actual 3D objects.

An array could be a stack of cubes with physics properties! 

AI drives characters, and there's allot you can do to visualize the underlying system through that character.


Same thing, a array serves a purpose to something. It's all about the context.

Just like the bits 1000001011011010110010101101110 can be the word "Amen", the value 14.84 or the following color depending on their context.



All of which you'd visualize in a completely different way ( even though it's the same data ).

To prove his point about a lot of logic, here's two examples of some level design / scripting work I've done using visual logic nodes in the Marmoset engine. The first image shows logic for a battle with advancing lines of infantry, firing cannons, etc.

Wow, that is pretty awesome, thanks for putting together those example diagrams for us!

I like the bright colors - I can almost see the nice bouncy easing curves on those nodes shrinking and growing and sliding and locking together. Do the colors have significance in your diagrams? (representing data types, maybe?)

I'm still digesting how it all would work, but this is already inspiring. I wonder how we could add visualization of data and dynamics (as Bret Victor suggests in Learnable Programming) in addition to your visualization of structure...

Not necessarily. Perhaps the array is used in a general sorting algorithm that should be applicable in any context, for any purpose. Sometimes you're going to need abstraction.

That's why I mentioned how bits are interpreted. Even though a logic / memory block is used for various purposes, you want to visualize the data as a color when it's used as a color, and as a string when it's used as text. The same can be applied to whatever you're actually sorting using the algorithm.

What about the debugging process? Looks like it would be hard.
May this visual programing run in a layer over everything else so you can introduce break-points or similar?