Placeholder node idea and colourfull nodes.

Berza

New member
Well, im just sharing my idea for using Behavior Designer :
1. DO, make colorful nodes. It helps a lot with reading the BTs, and its very easy to implement. Its just a couple of minutes for a simple icon for any arts person, or you can download somethink. 1646657998272.png
Here is an idea of color-code yellow, meaning TECHNICAL STUFF, on initing a tree.
1646658061452.png

And some story logic, color-coded.
Green is passing onto next chapters or tasks.
Red are flags (can i do something or has something being done.)
Even when this sequence is collapsed, i can still see what kind of sequence is that. (its just an empty class, derived from sequence witch changed icon).


Also a huge request, as i believe it will benefit the system a lot is a PLACEHOLDER node.
Brightly colorued, maybe in red and yellow stripes, doing nothing, or just putting log on a console.
Idea is to keep it as a memento, that something should be implemented here, and is visible RIGHT AWAY, when eyeballing that BT.
Its a huge benefit for workflow between programmer and designer.
I, as a programmer am preapring logic, and testing if it works. Once ready, designer is preparing all the dialogues around it, or copy-pastes this logic into other trees. Using Placeholder with a commentary (" Add player animation X here" or "Switch music to relaxed") is speeding up our work a lot.

I hope someone finds this tips interesting and helpfull, and i would love to see some color build in into Behavior Designer out of the box.
 
Thanks for the requests! You can color the node but not the icon - have you seen that feature? I do like the ability to color the icon as well.

Also a huge request, as i believe it will benefit the system a lot is a PLACEHOLDER node.
Brightly colorued, maybe in red and yellow stripes, doing nothing, or just putting log on a console.
Idea is to keep it as a memento, that something should be implemented here, and is visible RIGHT AWAY, when eyeballing that BT.
Its a huge benefit for workflow between programmer and designer.
I, as a programmer am preapring logic, and testing if it works. Once ready, designer is preparing all the dialogues around it, or copy-pastes this logic into other trees. Using Placeholder with a commentary (" Add player animation X here" or "Switch music to relaxed") is speeding up our work a lot.
What would be the difference between a placeholder node and something like the log node? You could then right click on the log node and replace it with any other task.
 
I didn't notice the ability to color a single node. But it sounds AWESOME. How do i do it?! :)
Only noticed them coloring when running ( red & green ) or orange when using search option.

The main and only difference between Placeholder node and log node is readability. Logs may be used for debugging or notyfing, while Placeholder purely indicates a need of replacement, once something is prepared and is perfectly easy to spot among all the other nodes.

1646815969910.png
For me it perfectly stands out, and is very easy to spot, especially when working as a team, and other person doesn't know that particular BT by heart.
 
I didn't notice the ability to color a single node. But it sounds AWESOME. How do i do it?! :)
Only noticed them coloring when running ( red & green ) or orange when using search option.
Open up the task inspector and on the top, to the right of the task name, is a half moon icon that allows you to change the node colors :)

The main and only difference between Placeholder node and log node is readability. Logs may be used for debugging or notyfing, while Placeholder purely indicates a need of replacement, once something is prepared and is perfectly easy to spot among all the other nodes.
I see, this should be pretty easy to include as it is just another task. Almost the biggest feature of this is having an icon that stands out.
 
1646905878647.png

This is amazing :) Now I wish have read some documentations. We are going to use colorfull icons anyway, but this is also a gamechanger. :)

Using those, a special placeholder icon is maybe less needed, but this coloring is still NOT sensitive to SEARCH option, while Placeholder node is.

Im going to make a XMAS TREE out of my BTs NOW !!! :)
 
A final note of what we have accomplished using both PH node and node coloring :
1652086392855.png

Using multiple colors for PH nodes we can instantly distinct the dialogue ones ( blue ) and minigame / flow stuff ( orange ) from one another, and don't waste time for "not-mine-stuff".

Additionaly, we are using 2 colors for dialogues.
Blue are dialogue ideas that need to requested to be created.
Turqoise are dialogues that have been already requested from our writer.
When a dialogue has been written and is ready, we can replace a turqoise PH into a dialogue node, and so on.

Cool stuff, i hope someone will find this usefull.
 
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