Thank you for your reply. I made a deep analysis. Seems like SMachines is a developer oriented solution. Using this for dialogues would be overkill, as it does not allow to extend States/Transition functionality. As long as showing dialog sentences is a repeatable procedure one should copy/paste same code in the States, instead of creating a specific State for the dialogues, reuse it, and allow to change it’s settings (character name, sentence, etc) without a code manipulation.
Just in case. You said local variables are in development. Please could you consider to implement that in such way:
- Expose State instance. That would be great to have it. It should give access to local variable anyway - right?
- If you expose State instance, would you allow to create custom States, with a custom functionality? Basically instead of placing all code usual way through the States Machine editor, one could implement this using a blueprint. And then select custom State in the State Machine Editor (similar to “Add State Machine Reference…”). This will catch several rabbits: it will allow private variables and functions. Will make it artist friendly, t.e. developer creates a custom State nodes with extra options for artist to select in the Details window.
- Same idea for Transitions. Expose Transition instance. Allow local variables and functions. But this guy seems more tricky, t.e. how we gonna select a custom Transition from the list?
Seems lots work to me. But should you grab it on board that would be awesome. 