Feedback

Hi Visionaire Team,
I like the engine a lot, as it is very easy to get started. But well, I already had some experience before the contest, (see Floras Exkursion Demo). But I had some points I encountered during the creation of the game for the competition, I want to share with you.

1. What is the best way to work as a team on the visionaire file? We used mercurial as a version control system and although we tried not to work at the same time on the .ved file, we had to merge using mercurial on or two times. Somehow somethings got missing during merge. Specially dealing with the texts (for translation and voice) we had in the end strings, which were missing a translation and voice. Why do you gather all information in one single file. Wouldn't it be better (and easier mergeable), if the project would be split in seperate files? Like one for each szene, object, person, ect. The images are already scattered in different folders, so the project files could be scattered, too.
   
2. Why is there no elseif actionpart? It could make checking for multiple conditions easier, as the increasing indentation when using bigger if else nesting.
   
3. The editor crashed a lot. Especially when creating an animation. I am using Kubuntu with wine. A native editor would be good or at least a more stable one.
   
4. Can a person talk while executing another animation? Sometimes it would be nice that a persons speaks during an animation, without stopping the animation.
   
5. Is there a possibility to redirect dropped items? For example when I want an item (let's say a twig) lying around (being a scene object at that instant) and want to comibine items with the object (the twig as a scene object). I want to redirect this action to the item of the object (the twig as an item). If I want to do this for all items the player can drop, this is quit a lot of repetetive work. This also applies if I have to versions of an item which should recieve more or less the same interactions. Here some sort of automatic redirection would be great.
   
6. There are also other repetetive tasks. Like having every exit of a scene have for example a cursor switch on mouse over. This can be done by copying the exit every time, but perhaps some sort of template could come in handy.
   
7. The scene object list can become a bit crowded when lots of objects are present. And as the object always have to be sorted by their y order, one can't group lets say: Interaction Objects, Way Exits, Just Foreground Graphics, etc. Perhaps it would be better to let the user freely sort the objects and at runtime sort them by y order.
   
8. Also the actionpart list can become quit long and confusing if more complex are done. I am not sure how one could improve this. I as a programmer would like an alternative code like view of the action parts. But I think that's by desin not wanted. But it would also make copying of bigger chunks of action parts easier. There I often had to copy them part by part.
   

Well this should be all for now. Maybe I'll remember later more.
I am also thinking about reimplementing the editor with python and qt to get a platform independent version of the editor with some extra features according to the points above.

Very good points! Particularly point 2. I think an elseif is essential. At the moment without elseif you have to create very complex and nested constructs to get some conditions. With elseif would be much easier.

Don't forget and & or query operators too. I used all of them when I script.

I tend to create execute a script action parts in the editor to do my queries when I can get away with it as I really don't like creating queries in the editor if I can help it as, they do tend to get long, messy & over-complicated.

Hi there,

Well team files are supported, but you can't really seperate the scenes or some like that, because there too many cross references. You can export team files and let somebody work with them and then reimport them. Problem is that conflicts can arise here if the team file has also changed some of the actions you changed.

Elseif is noted, there will be a lot of things overhauled in the future, the action system will get a better display as planned. Don't how it will be in the end.

The editor on scheduled to be rewritten with SDL and OpenGL without wxWidgets. That bundle is much more stable than wxWidgets. Native Linux won't happen as far I see it, even though we can build it, it's unsupportable. Linux Player is already hard enough.

4) is an often wished for feature, can't make any promises to that.

5) is noted on my list.

6) Yeah, but there is not really much to make the amount of work needed smaller. I planned some with drag and drop, don't know if that's really faster.

7) grouping is planned. But there is no possibility that we sort them at runtime, that may get you into undesirable side effects.

8) multi select is planned. You wanna see them as Lua or what ? I haven't really figured out yet, what would the best possibility to make the action parts display better.

I hate python and you will never get as much performance with that as with C++

Well, I love python ;-) The programming performance is much better in python. I don't think that performance for the editor is that critical. For the player, I agree, there the performance is needed to load and display all the graphics.
And python is very portable. At least, as long as the user wants to install python to use the programm.

For the references, I would suggest a reference style as in the lua script where each object is adressed by its scene and object name. The biggest problem I think will be the strings...

6) Here I thought that maybe the user could create templates like a exit template, which already has the actions the user wants for all exits and all other exits just inherit these functions from the template exit. Whould need to be a flexible system to make this not just applicable to exits.

7) Well the sorting doesn't need to be done at runtime, could also be at edit time, but the list display sorting could be different than the sorting ingame. Just two different order values for each object.

8) I thought about a sort of lua like script view of the action parts. Doesn't need to be directly lua, but a sort of script languange, which is a direct representation of the action parts, so that the script or the current view can be switched by a toggle button. Perhaps the script could also allow some comments and whitespace, so it would only be a one to one mapping of the functional part of this "script". This would allow to select and copy larger parts of one action part to the other.