Trying to decide if AC is for me

Timz

Hi all,

I'm creating a 3D adventure game and I'm making decisions about how I'll finish the game as it's something I'm working on by myself in my free time. I have a decent background in programming and Unity.

I wrote my own dialogue system that had many flaws but before starting a rewrite I decided to switch to Articy. I find myself in a similar situation for the scripting system. The scripting system I wrote (while nowhere near as nice or polished as AC) sounds similar to the concept of an action list. Simply put my system works as: When X happens a list of Y commands is triggered.

I use my own camera, interaction and dialogue system but I'm interested to see if AC could improve my game's scripting. So I'm wondering the following:

• Do AC actions allow me to serialize scene objects and perform operations on them? E.g. I call an action to lock a door in a scene.

• Will AC play nicely if I pick and choose features? As previously mentioned I have Articy for dialogue and my own systems for character, cutscenes etc.

  My typical use case will be triggering logic during quests which further break down into stages. I envision the action lists would replace my current "Script" class which is one or more commands that can be fired from anywhere.

Thanks.

ChrisIceBox

Welcome to the community, @Timz.

Do AC actions allow me to serialize scene objects and perform operations on them? E.g. I call an action to lock a door in a scene.

Yes, AC Actions support object serialization, as well as retaining references to scene objects from asset files. Custom Actions can be written and inserted into your project - a tutorial on this can be found here.

If you want to serialize specific data about a scene object (for recording in e.g. save-games), you can attach a "Remember" component. AC includes its own set (e.g. "Remember Transform" for saving Transform values), but you can also write and attach your own (tutorial here).

Will AC play nicely if I pick and choose features? As previously mentioned I have Articy for dialogue and my own systems for character, cutscenes etc.

AC is intended to be your project's "base level" asset, but it is designed to be flexible when letting other systems take over.

For Articy: naturally, there are different ways you could go about merging the two together, but an official integration can be found on the Downloads page. AC also works with Dialogue System, which also integrates with Articy, and so works as a good bridge between the two.

For characters: You'll need to attach AC's Player/NPC components to your characters to make them "visible" to AC, but you can forego AC's physical control over them in favour of your own motion controller. Simply setting the Motion control field to Manual will be enough to have AC cease updating their Transform - but a further tutorial on this can be found here.

For cutscenes: AC will place the game automatically in a "cutscene" state when a gameplay-blocking ActionList is running. When in this state, regular gameplay features such as interactivity, player control etc are temporarily suspended. However, you can also force the game into this state manually, by affecting the StateHandler's EnforceCutsceneMode property.

It's also possible to pick and choose which of ACs systems are running. If you just wanted to use AC solely for dialogue, for example, then you could use the Engine: Manage systems Action on startup to selectively disable the Interaction, Movement, Cursor etc systems so that it'll only run ActionLists that you manually command it to.

My typical use case will be triggering logic during quests which further break down into stages. I envision the action lists would replace my current "Script" class which is one or more commands that can be fired from anywhere.

Particularly if your game is already in mid-development, I would recommend taking a little time to see how AC works "as intended" first. This could be by tinkering with it in a fresh project - but if you're already a hand at Unity you can also get a feel for it by browsing the tutorials (either video or text).

The Manual is also available here.

If you'd like more specific advice/details on any other aspects of AC, just ask and I'll be happy to elaborate further!

Timz

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your reply I really appreciate it. I'll have a look at some of the tutorials and the documentation you linked me.

I'm not too heavy into development but I'm at a point where I have a small chunk of the game and am looking for some tools to replace my own that'll help me move to into full development.

Having had a brief look I think a lot of the scripting tools would help me out.
Thanks again.