Reply To: Request – articy draft integration

[georgberlin]

Hello Nuverian,

thank-you for replying!
What I am hoping for is an importer that reconstructs the articy node structure inside NodeCanvas.

Nevigo introduced their own articy draft importer for Unity in the last version – a plugin that converts articy draft story flows into scripts that can be attached to game objects.

http://www.nevigo.com/articy-importer/unity/html/welcome.htm#articyflowplayer

It is thus possible to use the articy scripts alongside nodeCanvas scripts on the same game objects. But it would be much easier to have the story flow visualised inside nodeCanvas, connecting it to the vast possibilities of nodeCanvas.

This about time for a disclaimer: I really can only assume that this would be helpful to other users, because until now my experience is entirely on the articy draft side of things. NodeCanvas gave me the courage to cross the line into Unity, because I find it extremely logical and simple to understand.

(About me: I have written interactive storytelling games for academic projects (such as this one:

or this one
http://tees.openrepository.com/tees/handle/10149/93931)
but mostly my work consists of writing. That is the beauty of articy draft, it is really well attuned to what non-programmers can do to design simple state machines and variables.)

Apparently, Dialogue System has been able to import articy draft projects for quite some time:

http://www.pixelcrushers.com/dialogue_system/manual/html/articy_draft.html

It bypasses the articy plugin to convert articy entities into its own nomenclature (quests etc.). This also means that there is no way back once a project has been imported.

Since you asked what would be useful for articy draft users – in an ideal world, the NodeCanvas importer would allow writers and developers to work in parallel in NodeCanvas and articy draft. I am completely out of my depth whether that is even possible. Maybe via an importer function that establishes a mapping of articy draft entities to existing nodeCanvas entities on first important and can use this mapping to enable/disable the update of attached scripts?

I do hope that this importer is not only my personal pie-in-the-sky idea but could turn nodeCanvas into the hub for Unity project that it deserves to be. Dialogue tied in with AI-behaviour will certainly play a bigger role in VR than it currently does in games.
articy draft and nodeCanvas could make the perfect dream team for writers and developers.

Best wishes and thank-your for taking the time,

Georg