Parallel-State Machines & Torque
by NA1234567 · in Technical Issues · 10/12/2003 (11:18 am) · 2 replies
I recenctly read an article on parallel state machines, and how very useful they can be in handling player actions. (Transitions from one state to another) and they can be replicated between the client and server in online games which could be VERY useful IMHO.
My thought is, dividing all the player abilities into different parallel state layers, the movement layer, the posture layer, and the action layer, which is controlled by a state manager. These states could be used to signal the animation subsystem to change the current animation. They could also be used to validate state change requests from the use interface. E.G. The player selects the wave command, but the player is crouched, and hence, cannot wave. It could also be used for combat with AI, or fed to a game server to keep track of the current state that each player is in.
As I understand it, its just a really good way of controlling all of these actions in an organised fashion.
Anyways, I'm not much of a programmer, and so I'm wondering how torque handles player actions if it doesn't use a method simmilar to this, specifically in multiplayer.
Cheers,
Raymond
My thought is, dividing all the player abilities into different parallel state layers, the movement layer, the posture layer, and the action layer, which is controlled by a state manager. These states could be used to signal the animation subsystem to change the current animation. They could also be used to validate state change requests from the use interface. E.G. The player selects the wave command, but the player is crouched, and hence, cannot wave. It could also be used for combat with AI, or fed to a game server to keep track of the current state that each player is in.
As I understand it, its just a really good way of controlling all of these actions in an organised fashion.
Anyways, I'm not much of a programmer, and so I'm wondering how torque handles player actions if it doesn't use a method simmilar to this, specifically in multiplayer.
Cheers,
Raymond
About the author
#2
10/13/2003 (11:26 pm)
Torque does have some validation code like this... Basically, if the client sends garbage data, the server ignores it, because it has an authoritative simulation. 
Steve Fletcher