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I labored on the identical engine as coderanger. I’ve a differing viewpoint. 🙂
First, we didn’t have a stack of FSMs – we had a stack of states. A stack of states makes a single FSM. I do not know what a stack of FSMs would appear to be. In all probability too difficult to do something sensible with.
My largest drawback with our World State Machine was that it was a stack of states, and never a set of states. This implies, e.g., …/MainMenu/Loading was completely different than …/Loading/MainMenu, relying on should you acquired the primary menu up earlier than or after the loading display (the sport is asynchronous and loading is usually server-driven).
As two examples of issues this made ugly:
- It led to e.g. the LoadingGameplay state, so that you had Base/Loading, and Base/Gameplay/LoadingGameplay for loading throughout the Gameplay state, which needed to repeat a lot of the code within the regular loading state (however not all, and add some extra).
- We had a number of capabilities like “if in character creator go to gameplay; if in gameplay go to character choose; if in character choose return to login”, as a result of we needed to point out the identical interface home windows in several states however make the Again/Ahead buttons nonetheless work.
Regardless of the title, it was not very “international”. Most inside recreation methods didn’t use it to trace their inside states, as a result of they did not need their states mucking about with different methods. Others, e.g. the UI system, might use it however solely to repeat state into their very own native state methods. (I’d particularly warning in opposition to the system for UI states. UI state just isn’t a stack, it is actually a DAG, and attempting to drive every other construction on it is just going to make UIs which are irritating to make use of.)
What it was good for was isolating duties for integrating code from infrastructure programmers who did not understand how the sport circulation was truly structured, so you can inform the man writing the patcher “put your code in Client_Patch_Update”, and the man writing the graphics loading “put your code in Client_MapTransfer_OnEnter”, and we might swap sure logic flows round with out a lot bother.
On a aspect challenge, I’ve had higher luck with a state set slightly than a stack, not being afraid to make a number of machines for unrelated methods, and refusing to let myself fall into the entice of getting a “international state”, which is actually only a difficult technique to synchronize issues by means of international variables – Certain, you are going to find yourself doing it close to some deadline, however do not design with that as your objective. Essentially, state in a recreation just isn’t a stack, and states in a recreation are usually not all associated.
The GSM additionally, as operate pointers and non-local conduct are likely to do, made debugging issues harder, although debugging these type of giant state transitions wasn’t very enjoyable earlier than we had it both. State-sets as an alternative of state-stacks does not likely assist this, however you need to be conscious of it. Digital capabilities slightly than operate pointers might alleviate that considerably.
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