[Bf-committers] Looking into HFSM and blender

[Paul Gavazzi]

On 20-Jul-06, at 4:26 PM, Ton Roosendaal wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I guess you've read the notes about Nodes in the logs?
> http://www.blender.org/cms/Blender_2_42.727.0.html

Yes, that is where I first looked into Nodes...

> I've only quickly checked on this XSI feature, but it seems to be  
> script based, allowing the scripts to be visualized as hierarchical  
> nodes.
>
Well state machine programming is very useful both for simulation  
(crowd, behaviours) and event-driven game logic programming. Almost  
all game logic or simulation behaviour can be visually represented  
with well-behaved state machines. Scripting is added as actions of  
states entry, exit, etc. So it is not only a visualization of  
scripts, but also a programming paradigm. I can also point at the  
latest Havok AI SDK to see that HFSM are popping up almost everywhere  
for animation and behaviour  control http://www.havok.com/content/ 
view/285/79/ that and being used internally by several game studios.

> What I saw of XSI's behaviour editor is really not something I'd do  
> with the current Node editor from scratch... you probably could  
> first design it entirely script based, as a new Python module. And  
> then use a Python-Node tree editor to have a more visual editing of  
> the linked scripts.
> That latter idea is what I've discussed with Nathan Letwory, who  
> worked on Py-node. Not sure where this code is now btw!

Exactly what I wanted to do (can you read my mind?). Completely  
script-based would really please me as an implementation. Nathan, any  
info on Py-node? But I will try to code it this way.

> Hope the info helps,
It really does, could not have found this by myself ;)

Thank you,

Paul