[Suggestion] 'Set Other Blackboard Variable' Action

[matt-newcombeParticipant]

Hi There,

So I introduced Node Canvas to someone new the other day and it’s been really interesting seeing which parts of it they struggle to use.

One that came up was the ‘Set Other Blackboard Variable’. So the use case for them is that you have two GO’s – [A] and [B]

For all purposes [A] and [B] are basically two agents doing the same thing with the same FSM setup.

[A] and [B] use the same FSM asset with Blackboards that are instanced yet have identical variables, they want to communicate a change from [A] to [B] by setting a variable in [B].

So the confusion is from the following thoughts in setting this up:

1.) Change ‘Use Self’ to point to object [B] that has a BB component that you want to send the variable to
2.) Press the Target Variable Name drop down, you see a list of BB variables that are on A’s Blackboard, but these are the same as the ones on [B]’s blackboard.
3.) Select the BB variable you *want* to have changed (not one that has a string of the variable name)
4.) Run the action, get confused as to why [B]’s variable does not change!

The main issue he had was intuitively he thought he was picking the variable to change, but instead it was actually a variable that had a ‘ToString’ method to try to find a name from.

So the actual suggestion:

When a GameObject with a BlackBoard Component has been specified in the ‘Set Other Blackboard Variable’ Action. Simply have the ‘Target Variable’ field inspect all available fields on the target BB and simply present a list of the variables to pick from, rather than having to pick a variable with a specific string. This will mean that you know you are picking a specific variable on the blackboard you are trying to change and benefits from there being less room to make the kind of mistakes my friend made.

Thanks,

Matt

[GavalakisKeymaster]

Hello Matt!

That sounds like a simple to implement, yet quite good suggestion/addition to avoid such confusions indeed 🙂
I will update the “Get/Set Other Blackboard Variable” tasks in the next version to be more streamlined, much similar to what you suggest here.

Thanks for taking the time to explain!

[Author]

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