Playmaker vs. Vizio vs. ?

Hi All,
I'm in the process of coming up with a code design for an app were looking to make over the next year, and I was wondering what suggestions people have for the easiest way to design the GUI.

I see that two major tools that are available are Playmaker and Vizio (about to be released) and I was wondering if anyone had used both of these and had an opinion about what the pros-cons are of these options. Are there any other options that I haven't noticed that are also worth considering?

Overall, the UI we're trying to make is not too complicated, but we're hoping someone has done most of the complicated things we're trying to do already that we can just leverage.

For example, we have a sidebar that we want to slide out showing a second render camera as well as some buttons for user actions, want to have popups in certain situations, maybe an interface to a store to purchase additional assets and things like that. These can all be done pretty simply in UnityScript, but will take a lot of work to have the necessary polish we need.

Thanks,
Liron

 

Why is this in "showcase"?

 

More than likely neither of those is what you are looking for. Those are visual programming systems, not GUI libraries. Take a look at EZ GUI (http://www.anbsoft.com/middleware/ezgui/), it might be more what you are looking for.

You'll still have to write code to manage the GUI stuff though, so you could probably leverage either of the systems you mentioned to help you do that.

 

Alternatively look at GUIX for gui, as its closer and more focused on gui, comes with an editor and has a very optimized usage of ongui (it works a dozen times faster)


as for "those not being gui": For Vizio one of the things shown on the thread was its usage in gui. But to me it looked totally horrible because gui code that requires me to pan around even on my 3840x1200 to see a rather simples UI code etc goes beyond any "bad productivity".

PlayMaker on the other side looks rather interesting as its not directly visual programming to my understanding, its more an FSM editor which for various things can be very handy (simple ai, world interaction etc), you could even use it to hook up gui but there it totally loses to GUIX

 

Vizio, as a Virtools replicate, is a (very accurate) representation of electircal circuit signal manipulation, and PlayMaker is closer to a representation of everyday logic manipulation. I believe the later, joined with script for specific features, is more adapted to convey gameplay than the former, which has you explicitly draw everything like you would write everything in code.

Vizio will appeal to programmers who already re-engineered their mind to understand Virtools, or electrical engineers who like to play with wires, resistors and logic gates to create calculus on a chip board. It's the same system..

The problem for game designers is that this "only" switches the coding language from written to drawn, which is essential for circuit or even game engine design, but doesn't improve the game designer's workflow much if at all.


PlayMaker, on the other hand, focuses on using process flow diagrams to display logical process operations (finite state machines) so you don't have to code it yourself (visual coding is still coding!). You still need to code the building blocks, but the glue is made for you.


To get games done in Unity with an easier workflow, I would therefore favor PlayMaker. I'm not saying Vizio is bad, but it's more focused towards experts.

I wonder if it would be possible to make PlayMaker building Blocks using Vizio...

EDIT: For GUI work, there is also QuadUI.

 

they all think of the visual scene as a starting state, sad really.

 

Universe (VIZIO) can be integrated with PlayMaker as easy as with any other middleware. Some our testers already works with EZ GUI within Universe (VIZIO). May be In near future we will create a bridge to the EZ GUI or other popular systems and share it as free addons (like iTweens bridge already created). This just question of time.

And. yes - the GUI editing is not our focus. It's easy to create and manage GUI from our Universe, but is not our main goal. Just a one side from many others.

 

Hi everyone,

I've been been using Virtools a lot and from my point of view the work made with Vizio is just brilliant. I'm an interaction designer and for what I have to do (working prototypes + proof of concept) visual programming is perfect. I don't really want to deal with lines of code because it's much easier for me to visualize in my mind visual programming before to make it. I'm not really familiar with Unity but I would love to work with it then I've tried lately Playmaker and Vizio. Both are easy to use and start doing things with but I can see more potential in Vizio which is really open!
I truly think that Vizio could easily make accessible Unity to a lot of new users like Artist, Students or Designers like me and will push Unity to be used for doing more stuff than video games, like interactive installations by instance.

 

Question, some people are calling it Vizio(the original name?), but some are calling it Universe? which is it, Vizio and/or Universe?
P.S. Vizio ROCKS!!!

 

Now the name is Antares Universe and VIZIO is obsolete because this name is already used by other (not our) product.

 

ahhhhh, I was wondering about that. Cool, UNIVERSE it is then!!! I'm a beta tester, and Universe Rocks!!! Everyone should consider a purchase when it is release IMO!

P.S. When is the official open beta date? And is there a set price yet, or a special price for beta testers ;-)

 

I don't see how it would be easy to integrate Playmaker with Vizio, and vice-versa. Could you give me an example and the required process of how this would be done?

(p.s. sorry to hijack the thread!)

 

In Universe, just looking for Universal Wizards. This blocks can easy call any public methods in any classes inside your project. Include Playmaker or anything also. Just 3-5 minuts to create this bridge.
Or you can write the intermediary-class and use it's methods to communicate.
Or you can write your own Smart blocks to do it.

In Universe available a many ways for solve any tasks.

 

I would pay for PlayMaker 1.1+ integrated in Universe, just to not have to do it myself.

 

Well, when we found a bit time to do it, we will create a user-friendly bridge to this tool. But, right now, I can't say how soon. We have a lot more necessary tasks in our list. May be somebody from our custamers will do it first of as.

 

It would be nice to be able to use Playmaker to call Vizio scripts (as I see this being far more useful than the other way around). Is this possible? How is Vizio attached to objects (if at all)?

 

Yes. Our products should be "" instead "vs"

Universe (VIZIO) is attached as VizioComponent (MonoBehaviour). Universe graph can be called by Universe Messages as simple as Unity Messages but much more faster.

 

Actually I'm using them together. Lots of fun and extreme time saver.
I think PlayMaker in Antares would be better because You don't need scripting at all within Antares. PlayMaker does require some code.
I see me often exposing variables and properties from PlayMaker via scripts to use them in Antares. Would be very interesting to have a shortcut.

 

Okay. This seems like a good solution. So I can use Playmaker as the FSM, but Vizio to produce the actual functionality. Seems like an okay solution, but it seems like it's much better to use one or the other (with scripting Actions in the case of Playmaker)

In my opinion (I'm primarily a programmer), therefore, Playmaker would be better suited to projects where those designing the functionality aren't that interested in the intricate details that provide the functionality, but want to be able to match, say, playing audio alongside custom Actions.

Where the designers are well-versed in scripting, the sheer power of Vizio would easily win over that of Playmaker. Plus, the debugging capabilities of Vizio seem to even surpass native Unity debugging (Monodevelop's crap, so we'll forget that!).

Are these fair conclusions to make, or am I missing the point of Playmaker/VIzio somewhat?

 

Universe has FSM too. It's pritty easy.

 

Also, it's very easy to create your own logic blocks (it's named Smart Blocks) in Universe : http://forum.antares-universe.com/vizio-logicblock-programming-guide-t205.html

I think, this will be very interesting for programmers.

 

I tried playmaker during the beta, what's nice about it is that it's really easy to use and it's quite straightforward.
But i wanted to wait Antares Universe as it was promising to be a real horsepower solution, and according to the recent first impressions Neodrop and his gang have delivered a great product.
Universe has FSM, and it should be possible to have the same ease of use as Playmaker whith some extra work ?
Universe community will grow with time and i'm sure that we'll have some great addon etc.
Neodrop you need to provide more tutorials from really basic stuff to more advanced to show how your Universe shine and to appeal to all kind of user from noob to Jedi master.

 

Now we already have 17 tutorials. And also some in progress. Sure, we will create it more as our active customers too.
But a good point is a users requests.

And SamSam, why to wait ? You can enter in Universe here http://u3d.as/content/neo-pax/antares-universe-vizio-/1CJ

 

I'm fascinated by Universe but couldn't really use it because I couldn't find proper documentation.
Can someone post a link to a complete manual and/or reference (if it exists)?

 

Complete manual in progress. All, what we have at this moment, are collected here :
http://forum.antares-universe.com/documentation-f8.html
and here :
http://forum.antares-universe.com/tutorials-f5.html

 

Looks like this has great potential. Could really do with some step by step tutorials and example projects for download. Or am I missing something?

Regards
Si

 

Do any of the visual programming add-on's allow you to export the js or C# code of a completed FSM?

 

This post is awesome, and a good example of the differences. I wonder where uScript fits, maybe kinda in the middle but closer to playMaker with regards ease of use?

 

Frank Oz, here is a quick example I did of one of the ways you could do this with uScript. I am using SubSequences in this case (nested uScript logic) which we haven't really talked about yet. Basically, the two special case nodes are encapsulated uScript visual logic in an easy to read package. Internally, they could be doing a bunch of stuff (like playing sounds, animations, setting global variables, changing a playMaker state, etc.) and you can go in and edit the visual scripting at any time.

The bottom script is the same as the top, but I just check with playMaker to see its current state before bothering to do the alarm stuff.

 

Awesome! Can't wait to get my hands on it.

 

uScript,

This is as bad as a peep show! Every time you show something you just leave us wanting more! BETA PLEEEEEEASE!!!???

 

Haha, agreed. I've come to the conclusion uScript is being developed by females. Masters of the cruel tease.

 

Hmmm that doesn't really seem like Playmaker integration as such

I was hoping that you would be able to export the scripts as custom Actions, then use those in playmaker. It may be that the Playmaker developers have to find some way of integrating with uLink, rather than the other way around.

 

LOL, sorry all. We ware working very hard to release info on our thread and get the beta out ASAP!

 

Universe works with Playmaker ? It's easy!

 

RickyBozzy, just to clarify, our above post was just in answer to what it would visually look like to create the proposed flowchart in uScript-- it wasn't meant to show off our playMaker integration. In this case I just simply used a playMaker property that was exposed through reflection sort of as a bonus example. We have uScript nodes for playMaker already internally and have other things to announce as well in a bit regarding this topic. We do hear what you are saying and will have more to show regarding that soon. Simplicity and readability are very important to us with uScript.

 

@uScript, I want to give it a try, but I'd like to know if I can do in uScript something like this:
http://forum.antares-universe.com/playmaker-t305.html

People say Universe is complicated, but in fact it is not. If you know scripting in Unity you know how to use Universe.
How is that going to be exactly in uScript too? For example, Universe uses Unity's internal names, Awake, Update, GetComponent, etc etc.
In uScript is that the same or do I have to figure out that Update() is called something else, or it doesn't exist at all?
I mean, if there is a whole new named stuff, It will take time to understand what in uScript is what in Unity. Could you talk a little about that?
In the screenshots I can't see nothing related to Unity's scripting itself.

 

In fact I would like to find more abstraction in Universe, and not need to know Unity scripting to work with a visual tool. However, finally all ends in Unity scripts, so maybe is the only way… ¿?

 

In first instance, programmers need to work with those tools to produce blocks that artists can just "drag&drop and the job is done".
At the moment the easiest tool I found to do that is Universe.
After your team have some good blocks done by a programmer, artists can have a lot of fun with extremely easy to use tools, in fact I see I can make for them Smart Blocks that does a lot of stuff all by itself, no need for spaghetti. Even PlayMaker will look harder to use when they have all the blocks a programmer can produce to them into Universe.

But if you are an artist trying to code your own game and you know nothing about programming logics, you will have a hard time, no matter what tool you use.

 

Well maybe smartblocks will be created by the community for pothers to use. That would be wonderful.

 

@WolfoX - I realized I had not answered this specific question in the uScript thread. uScript uses standard Unity names where it makes sense to do so (in our case-- as long as it doesn't conflict with our goal of making it easy to read/use by non-Unity programmers). For example, we have event nodes such as Update and OnGUI and action nodes such as Destroy and AttachComponent.

We also plan to call out Unity specific programming name/conventions in our documentation as a more technical reference to those who care about that kind of stuff.


For everyone else who may be wondering, I answerd WolfoX's other points (and other uScript related questions) in our main forum post.

 

Bitverse is really quite good. It's still a WIP but it's good to go. Not sure why it never gets mentioned in visual GUI threads.
http://code.google.com/p/bitverse-unity-gui/

 

Because it's not the same thing as playMaker, uScript and Universe.

 

Personally I'm waiting for uScript first to make a decision.
Hopefully it will be priced a bit below $100 too, that alone will sway me to get that instead of Playmaker as I think it has similar goals and capabilities. For us $100 is quite a bit of money if I convert it to our currency.

 

But less of money than it used to be before the USD sucked as badly as it does at the time (continously dropping in value, all non US devs will sooner or later have to raise their prices to still earn the same amount actually as USD vs other stable currency dropped by 20% since summer 2010)

Given that Universe costs $100 in its beta and PlayMaker normally $100, I wouldn't expect uScript or anything else with similar capabilities cost less actually as creating it costs already a lot of time, but what costs even more is contious development which you expect if you buy it, you don't buy it with the assumption that it will be this version only with only bug fixes to major bugs for free afterwards

 

That's non-sense, it's like saying we can't combine multiple actions (or a full FSM) into a single action in Playmaker. That's how we do things in the studio:
1 - Prototype using multiple states and connections in the same FSM
2 - Test / Debug / Refine / iterate until perfectionism-exhaustion
3 - If another similar FSM is needed, use Playmaker's versatile template system.
4 - If the test-proven FSM makes for a nice re-usable logic block (say, a custom controller or generic function), convert it to an action.

Sure, step 4 requires some coding, which's absolutely NO trouble if you can get around Visual Studio - I'm no hardcore coder (believe me, I got to know who they are) and have submitted most custom/hybrid actions in the official Playmaker forum. I can't see that process being any easier in uScript and definitely not in Universe, although uScript approach interests me for being clean which provides high maintainability for future changes. That's the #1 advantage of visual coding (ie. Virtools, uScript, Universe), making you and other people's logic flow comprehensible for future changes.

Some will then say "aha, so if you want to stay 100% visual you admit that Universe is better than Playmaker". It really depends if you need custom functionality in your project. The real point is, in the same way that uScript is adding high-level features on a daily basis and Universe is still crawling in the "building blocks" department, Playmaker is about to gain hierarchical FSM support (in fact "nesting" FSMs as encapsulated logic blocks) and global variable support.

It's really as if Playmaker is going top-down (from high-level to lower-level features) while the other two are moving upwards. Now, recommending designers who want to keep as away from code as possible to start with the (currently) lower-level-catering tools is completely irresponsible and will only scare them away from visual tools. IMO.