Comment thread: Scripting Tutorial

HughHugh CameramanSan Francisco, CA Join Date: 2010-04-18 Member: 71444NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts
in Future Perfect General Discussion
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  • BruteBrute Join Date: 2009-06-10 Member: 67778Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
    Great guide. In my opinion, no matter how capable a system is, tutorials like these are by far the most importing thing to have. Very often I see things (like frameworks, layout languages, converter tools, publishing tools, ...) that have their functionality hidden so deep in their documentation, that you have no idea how to start.

    What I did not quite get: when a blueprint is changed, all instances need to be deleted and replaced (like here and here)? I guess "instances" is not even the right word to use here. Maybe I do not get the reasoning, but it seems highly inconvenient.
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  • OstrichGuyOstrichGuy USA Join Date: 2014-11-28 Member: 199849Members
    Brute wrote: »
    What I did not quite get: when a blueprint is changed, all instances need to be deleted and replaced (like here and here)? I guess "instances" is not even the right word to use here. Maybe I do not get the reasoning, but it seems highly inconvenient.
    I feel that something like a "refresh" button may come in handy for this. At least something that deletes and recreates a blueprint for you.

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  • dushandushan Breaker of Games Join Date: 2011-10-30 Member: 130202Members, NS2 Developer, Squad Five Blue, Pistachionauts
    Brute wrote: »
    What I did not quite get: when a blueprint is changed, all instances need to be deleted and replaced (like here and here)? I guess "instances" is not even the right word to use here. Maybe I do not get the reasoning, but it seems highly inconvenient.

    That's definitely a somewhat controversial design choice - we discussed it a bunch and it's a trade-off between simplicity and power. We think we can mitigate some of the lost power with clever UI (like that 'refresh' button) and the simplicity win is huge. I posted answer to a similar question elsewhere:
    Our blueprints are cloned instead of instanced for simplicity and robustness. Keeping track of dependencies on blueprints is a significant cognitive load - especially when you start overriding some properties on the instanced entities and conflicting changes happen upstream in a blueprint (or perhaps another blueprint that your blueprint depends on). Add multiplayer editing to the mix and it would be pretty chaotic :).

    For blueprints that change often (e.g. Tile in this guide) you'd use a kind of a spawner but it's not quite ready and I didn't want to complicate things any more - hence the unnecessary deleting & recreating. We're also planning editor functionality to mass update entities from their original blueprints but it will be a user initiated action rather than automatic.

    This is exactly the sort of thing that the Architect Edition is for - we want you guys to test drive our crazy ideas and if they don't work out as we hoped, we'll take the crazy down a notch :).
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  • dushandushan Breaker of Games Join Date: 2011-10-30 Member: 130202Members, NS2 Developer, Squad Five Blue, Pistachionauts
    Here's a quick follow up video:

    It doesn't have the polish of Hugh's videos but the man has suffered enough :)

    -D
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