Pixel Crushers Forum

Does anyone know of a program that could be used to model out the factions/relationships visually?

Ideally it would also support multi-inheritance and be able to average or sum values automatically to help the data models stay maintained.

Tony, do you use anything specific when planning out your factions/relationships?

RelationsInspector integration is on the roadmap for the next version of Love/Hate. I think this will be a really nice solution to what you're asking about.

Another dev did some pretty neat stuff with MS Excel.

Excel *shudder*.

I had to do manual data creation in excel once, 65k rows with data across many tabs (it was for a demo from Microsoft using the inBloom service, before it went bust). They wanted to "tell a story" with the data, and so I had to go through on several thousand of the rows and create a story of students grades over time (things like "every 2 weeks Suzy seems to have a dip in grades, using this data the teacher was able to figure out that those were weeks she spent with her other parent because divorce was tough"). All to feed a front end web demo (well, Apps for Excel demo).

I've avoided it as much as I can since then lol.

I'm half tempted to whip up a wpf application, since we may be hiring someone specifically to come up with personalities for the characters (but having us do the actual data entry to save money). Not sure if I want to jump down that rabbit hole though or bite the bullet and have 'em use visio or make do with UML diagrams or ERD diagrams.....

I hear you. It's crazy how prevalent Excel still is in the game industry.

Do you have any interest in using RelationsInspector? If so, I could send you an advance copy of the integration package when it's ready.

I need to check it out a bit more and have one of my partners look at it.

Let me get back to you on that in a day or two.

Thanks!

Well, it certainly looks like it would be useful.

Unfortunately RelationshipInspector uses the editor license and we have a policy of not buying any asset that uses that license (complicates negotiations with independent contractors and hurts our ability to scale up the team) >.<

That's a shame about your policy regarding editor extension licenses, but I understand where you're coming from. We publishers have discussed with the Asset Store the challenges that devs face with their current licensing models. They have a lot of on their plate, but we're hopeful that they'll be able to eventually introduce improvements to make it easier for devs.

You might try the open source Cytoscape. Here's an example that one dev used with the Dialogue System to visualize the connections in his network of highly-interconnected conversations:

Thanks, I'll check into that.

If the editor license didn't require a license per person that touches our repository it would be totally doable. Like how Apex handles it; one license per person that touches the actual asset. But if we only ever have, say, one person that touches the editor piece and have a team of 30 other people that have access to the repository, we'd need 30 licenses. So 29 licenses would be completely useless (assuming each person only uses one computer-if they've multiple they use we'd have to buy them multiple copies).

It's even worse with independent contractors/outsourced agencies, as you have to buy them their own license that you can't reclaim by the terms of the license (you can only repurpose them within your organization... so any outside person/agency you have to buy fresh licenses for and can never get them back, so an even bigger waste of money).

My investors would skewer me over that lol.

If all else fails I might put a quick focus on a wpf app that saves out to json (and a little later down the road the ability to load the json at runtime into Love/Hate itself). If I go that route I'll probably open source it.