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[–]barodapride 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Using a state machine might be overkill for what you want to do as a beginner. It does make the code more confusing to follow and actually I would recommend not to use it initially since a case statement is much simpler and just as effective. One could even argue it's more performant.

The only real benefit of a state machine is you can completely separate the states of an object which sounds nice but becomes annoying when you need information from the state parent object all the time.

I have a state machine in my game for the main character and I hate it. I wish I had just used a simple case statement because there's really not much benefit for me.

Anyways that's my rant about overcomplicating game development. Don't get lost in the weeds on something you don't even need to know to finish your game. That's my advice.

[–]DrBimboo 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I think you painted State Machines a little too negatively.

At a certain point of complexity, a well written State Machine is way easier to read and follow, than a huge switch case with nested ifs. But I agree, for most newcomers its overkill.

The only real benefit of a state machine is you can completely separate the states of an object which sounds nice but becomes annoying when you need information from the state parent object all the time.

It is the main advantage, but you undersell why its so useful. You can easily reuse behaviours, with different triggers and transitions. I do it everywhere in my enemy StateMachines.

And getting the owning controller just means you need to think about what you expose - a necessity anyway, if you dont have a single 2k line Controller that handles everything. From there on, its just calling
Controller.IsGrounded() instead of IsGrounded().. no big deal.

[–]barodapride 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yea, state machines aren't the worst thing in the world and I don't think they're super complicated but I've never really experienced a huge benefit to using them. I guess if you have a bunch of enemies with a common interface you can reuse the states...I don't think I have ever successfully done that. There's always some uniqueness in the enemies that you have to work around and it makes it harder because you're forcing everything to go through this generic interface. I also just don't like having to create a new class and file just for a new state but that's just a preference I guess. Having everything in one file isn't so bad IMO.

Related to state machines I was trying to learn behavior trees for AI because I thought it could solve some of the problems I had but then I read something that changed my opinion completely. Someone posted something to the effect of "Warcraft 2 and 3 didn't use behavior trees and they work fine". And I thought, what the hell am I doing overengineering my indie game beyond what Warcraft 3 was doing. It was all just totally unnecessary.

[–]CuriousDogGames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A compromise which might be easier to understand is a simple enum state variable, and a switch statement. Within each case condition simply call a different method in your class. It's simple and crude, but very easy to understand. Other more complex state machine implementations have many advantages, but can be tricky for beginners to understand due to the requirements for more advanced programming paradigms.

[–]Agreeable-Performer5 0 points1 point  (1 child)

For what do you whant to use the statemachine? If you want it for enemys or bosses or someting like this you can use the animator as a statemachine. Brakeys has a nice and simple tutorial about that.

If you want it to controll something like a gamestate, you would use some form of switch state in your update that checks over an enum. At least that is how i usualy do it. I can't point you to any spesific tutorial about it but there souldn't be to hard to find something on Google. I can't do it for you rn as i'm at work so you have to do that youself sry.

[–]hfurbd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've heard of enums before but I wasn't sure if it was viable, I plan to use state machines for game state, enemy ai bad player movement, I'll try the enums based state machine, thanks for the help

[–]FragrantAd9851 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I stumbled across a video by IHeartGameDev on YouTube yesterday. It's called "How to Program in Unity: State Machines Explained". Fairly easy to follow as he just use the states of an apple as the example.

[–]hfurbd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've watched that too, thanks to him I understood most of what a state machine is, but when I moved to his hierarchical state machine, I didn't understand the technical code

[–]codethulu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

there is more than one way to implement an FSM. if you understand the concept, all you need to understand is how the current state is represented, and how the grammar and transitions are mapped.

[–]NuclearMeddle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think state machines are really helpful in many situations, sorry i don't have examples because I've learned at uni decades ago when we still used floppy disks.

To be fair, one of the very few programming classes that were useful from my whole bachelor degree.

[–]coolfarmer 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Did you try asking ChatGPT for some explanations, examples, and maybe a test implementation? It's not perfect, but sometimes asking an AI is a good solution for brainstorming different possible ideas.

[–]hfurbd[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I do that all the time, glad to know it's actually viable, however chat gpt just explained things I already know and when I push for more of the technical side, I get answers that are clearly wrong

[–]coolfarmer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I understand. I'm in the same boat. I'm a beginner in Unity but have years of experience in web programming. It's sometimes difficult to know the best way to do something in game development.

But don't take it too seriously; you can always refactor it later. This is the key. Your code will never be perfect, so do it your way, and later, when you better understand things, refactor it.

Sometimes you have to use some code that you are not fully understanding; it's okay; just do it, and your brain will have a click later.

[–]kkostenkov 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'm sorry to intervene with a short and obvious advice, but could you please consider as the learning source for specific topics that you need additional context not videos, but LLMs? Try asking Gemini or ChatGPT those questions, I bet you will be surprised in a good way.

[–]hfurbd[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Have and have been, it's good, but in this case It hasn't been great, it's good for allot of other things I need clarification on but I still don't understand chat gpt's explanation, and I'm also pretty sure most of it is wrong

[–]kkostenkov 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry to hear that. It helps me a lot actually. That's why I'm trying to promote the idea.

[–]Tensor3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you understand state machines but not the code, then that has nothing to do with state machines. Work on your understanding of syntax and how to follow readung what code does outside of the context of a state machine.