Best Practices for Gadget placement so that months later, I “can figure out how this mess works”!
Best Practices for Gadget placement so that months later, I “can figure out how this mess works”!
I do hope that Mm has figured out “Best Practices” for organizing and documenting logic-heavy scenes and games.
Before I go too far, and dig the hole too deep, I want to adhere to good standards so that anyone who remixes my creations can quickly understand how they work, learn from the experience and I can also debug and understand them when I return to do more tweaking after a period of absence.
Some of the logic and gadgets in such may include
1. Continuous localized sound effects such as water flow
2. Event-driven localized sounds
3. Health impact effects caused by trigger zones and others caused over time which “follow” puppets
4. Global effects which affect the entire scene
5. A variety of fairly complex calculations which collect data from numerous sources and previous events, add in some randomness and cause things to happen to puppets and environment
So there will be gizmos which belong to stationary object, moving objects and the global scene, many of which will be interacting with each other. There’ll be lots of wires! This can quickly turn into a complex mess.
I’m looking for guidance on organizing this chaos and placing documentation for the remixer.
Even an example from the Dreamiverse which does this well would help!
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“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
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It is very hard to define guidelines for "system architecture", which is what you are talking about. Practice makes perfect. Yet, there are two tools you should definitely try using which will help you with modularization and standardization.
Use microchips as much as possible! This handy thing helps you organise everything and create modules.
On top of that you should use nodes. It can be used for naming inputs and outputs, for your own memory aids, or for anyone who might work with your creations.
On top of that, take your time with naming modules (microchips). A good name is one that is short but effective.
Hope this helps a bit. -
All of the contraptions in the Dreamiverse Dash Contraptions were set up using our internal best practices for laying out logic which John B designed.
Once we all started using these best practices it really made building the assets in that collection a lot faster and they were also easier to maintain and share.
Everything in that collection is remixable so feel free to dig into them to see what we did :)
Hope this helps - Peter -
'@mmdev7
Hi Peter
Any chance of publishing the Mm “internal best practices for laying out logic”, even in some stripped down form?
If it’s not ready for public prime time, I’d be happy to volunteer to try to clean it up for a wider consumption.
(I was a Product Manager for a very complex software product before I retired, so writing stuff that a wide audience could understand was a big part of my job)
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