Playmaker

PlayMaker ↗ is a popular visual scripting tool for Unity specifically designed to be friendly for non-programmers.

NOTE

Extensions for third-party products serve mostly as examples on how you can integrate Naninovel with other tools. They contain bare minimum functionality and may become incompatible due to changes in third-party product. Please do not consider these extensions part of Naninovel: we are not providing any support or help on using them with Naninovel beyond the scope of sample projects.

Setup

Install PlayMaker following instructions from the official manual ↗.

Download and import PlayMaker extension package ↗.

The custom Naninovel actions should appear in the PlayMaker actions browser under "Naninovel" category.

Usage

The following video demonstrates using PlayMaker FSM (finite state machine) to initialize Naninovel engine, preload and play a scenario script.

Events

Some of the essential Naninovel events can be automatically routed to PlayMaker FSMs. For this, create a global user event ↗ with an appropriate name and use it inside an FSM. Following are the available event names:

• Naninovel/Engine/OnInitialized
• Naninovel/ScriptPlayer/OnPlay
• Naninovel/ScriptPlayer/OnStop
• Naninovel/StateManager/OnGameSaveStarted
• Naninovel/StateManager/OnGameSaveFinished
• Naninovel/StateManager/OnGameLoadStarted
• Naninovel/StateManager/OnGameLoadFinished
• Naninovel/TextPrinterManager/OnPrintTextStarted
• Naninovel/TextPrinterManager/OnPrintTextFinished
• Naninovel/LocalizationManager/OnLocaleChanged

It's also possible to broadcast custom PlayMaker events from naninovel scripts using @playmaker command:

@playmaker EventName

— will invoke a global user event named "EventName" in all the active FSMs on scene.

The command also allows sending events to specific FSMs by using fsm and object parameters. The first parameter allows specifying FSM names, which should receive the event, eg:

@playmaker EventName fsm:Fsm1,Fsm2

— will invoke an event named "EventName" for FSMs with name "Fsm1" and "Fsm2".

When object parameter is specified, the event will only be sent to FSMs, that are applied to game objects, which has corresponding names, eg:

@playmaker EventName object:Obj1,Obj2

— will invoke an event named "EventName" for all the FSMs, that are attached to game objects with names "Obj1" and "Obj2".

You can as well combine fsm and object parameters to farther filter the FSMs, that should receive the event.

Global Variables

It's possible to access a global PlayMaker variable in Naninovel scripts with the following custom expression functions available in the extension package:

• GetPlayMakerGlobalVariable("variableName") — retrieves a variable of a simple type (int, float, string, etc) with the "variableName" name
• GetPlayMakerGlobalArray("variableName", arrayIndex) — retrieves a value stored at "arrayIndex" index of an array variable with the "variableName" name

Given you have a "Score" integer and "FinishedRoutes" bool array global PlayMaker variables, you can use them in Naninovel scripts as follow:

Felix: My score is {GetPlayMakerGlobalVariable("Score")}.

@if GetPlayMakerGlobalArray("FinishedRoutes",2)
    Third route (second array index) is completed.
@else
    Not yet.
@endif

To assign a PlayMaker's global variable value from Naninovel script, use @pset command as following:

; Assign "10" to PlayMaker's integer global variable named "Score".
@pset name:Score value:10

; Assign "Banana" at 10th index of "Groceries" PlayMaker's global array.
@pset name:Groceries index:10 value:Banana

IDE Extension

To add IDE support for playmaker-specific commands distributed with the extension package (eg, @playmaker), see the guide on generating metadata for custom commands.