Difference between revisions of "Riding the Waves: A Workflow Tip Guide"

Revision as of 13:18, 20 August 2022

On this page you will find a bunch of tips on how you can potentially improve your workflow. Just in case any of you don't already know what workflow is, it is the efficiency of how you work, which can summed up as so...

How long does it take you to perform specific tasks?
How consistent is the time it takes you to perform said tasks?
How much work is involved in performing said tasks?

Now that you know what workflow entails, is there anything you could do to increase the efficiency of your workflow that will help you decrease the time it takes you to perform tasks while reducing the amount of work involved in finishing the tasks? The answer to that is yes, but it may take you some time to figure out what workflow works best for you, as everyone is different & there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

Anyway, let's crack on...

Quick note: I just want to point out that this tip guide isn't really a tutorial, just think of it as a sort of text based Ted Talk. My goal here is to give you an idea of my workflow & why I work the way I do, & not to tell you how you should work, but instead hopefully provide you with some ideas on how you can potentially improve your own workflow. In the end, however you choose to work is entirely up to you.

Editor versus Scripting

A lot of you are probably going to be facepalming right now, as most of you that know me (AFRLme) know that I am very script heavy when I provide answers on the forum & Discord server. The reason I prefer scripting over action parts is because for me it's much faster & easier for me to type than it is to drag the mouse cursor all around the Visionaire Studio editor clicking on this & that - for me it's that simple, it's faster & easier.

I'm not saying that you should all switch to scripting but scripting is so much faster if you are willing to learn it. Why? Because something that you create in the editor might require a 100 action parts, but might only require a few lines of code or a single line of code.

Having said that, I am not averse to using action parts, I do still use them when they are easier & faster than doing something with script. I also like to mix & match action parts with scripting via execute a script & if lua result action parts.

A quick example of when action parts can be faster than scripting would be simple condition/value based queries where you only need to query a single thing. If you need to query multiple things or perform complicated queries that involve the and or or query operators then you should consider using the if lua result action part as that is what that action part is for, but it does require scripting knowledge to use.

In other words it's all about figuring out what works best for each situation & not being afraid to get your hands dirty, experiment, & learn new things. If you aren't willing to do that, then enjoy working at the speed of sloth on all your projects.

Conditions versus Values

When it comes to conditions & values, conditions are very simple to use compared to values as they only have two states, which are true & false, however that doesn't mean that they are efficient workflow wise.

I tend to work with values a lot more than conditions, & the reason behind that is because they are excellent at dealing with multi-state situations & because they have multiple operators types you can query, it means that you can create a single value & assign it to multiple scene objects & use the different available query operators to control how the value affects each scene object.

Quick note: By assigning a condition or a value to the properties section of scene objects & interface buttons, you can control when the object or button will be visible (active) or hidden (inactive).

Here's a quick example of defining language via conditions & values...

Condition Example

change condition "language_is_English" to true
change condition "language_is_German" to false
change condition "language_is_French" to false
etc...

Value Example

value "v_lang" = 1

As you can see values are much faster as there's much less work involved.

Resources

Name	Description
animation_tnt_v2.zip	A working .ved file, complete with resources. Check out the readme.txt file for instructions. Visonaire Studio 5.1.9.1+ required.