Very useful, good job!

NAJS!

dear mother of dog this is what i need in my life,
does the visual editor use the same thread as vvvv? should i be worried about performance?

Thanks & Danke für die Blumen :)

Did you use any library like stateless for example or did you write the state machine from scratch? Anyway do you think it's feasible to extend the plugin to support hierarchical state machines?

thanks, this is great!

re hsm: I did some initial testing with a hsm plugin using stateless a couple of years ago and have had the plan to do something more proper since then and possibly even an editor (test used custom text dsl/parser). Unfortunately my time for doing any serious development has been very limited and haven't been able to squeeze it in yet.

Any hierarchical state machine (HSM) can be expressed as a regular finite state machine (FSM) but with a HSM you can make it a lot simpler with less states and transitions because you have nested states and a transition/action will happen if it's either handled by a leaf state itself or any of it's parents.

A reference visualization is proved by the UML standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UML_state_machine

Posted a screenshot before but I guess nobody saw it (?): root-190#comment-220133

HSM

The UML article on wikipedia I linked in my first post describes the advantages quite nicely. But in short: what beyon said.

Most likely one won't need it for the typical car show exhibit we are all so fond of.

But think of a more complex iot-type-situation, e.g. a concept car with a lot of embedded devices, sensors, buttons, touchscreens, motors and whatnot simultaneously talking to and managed by a central "vvvv-hub".

@beyon / Stateless

There is a GUI for Stateless / Visual Studio called Stateless Designer. It currently also only supports FSM though.

Ah and while we are at it, also a nice thing supported by stateless and explained here are guard clauses.

No more thousands counter switch delay = monoflop framedelay etc ! ! ! !

minor bug in combination with latest alpha. the json from the helpfile won't load.

temporary fix:
just reset the node by Alt+right clicking, that's it...create your graph as usual and save it.

will be fixed in next release.

@everyoneishappy, not sure if i understand u right. we're not talking about a spreaded automata right ? because multiple instances you can have. each automata graph is saved per node instance.

in case you copy your automata node and edit the new graph, you might need to trigger a transition at least once to update everything since the node behaves as lazy as possible to save cpu cycles.

does this answer your question ?

@everyoneishappy, it will come

i was talking to many pro patcher and this was the most popular question " is it spreadable". on the contrary, when i asked how often do you use a spreaded automata basically only one guy did it once, years ago :)

anyway, it's almost on top of the todo list

i have used spreaded automata a couple times.

one particular useful case was handling 20 touch points with a single automata.

Is there around some sort of tutorial on using it?
Looks great but never worked with automata

@parabola. i will make a tutorial video. october/november

there are different use cases.
i usually use one central automata, controlling my whole vvvv project. telling each subpatch in which state (aka scene) i am and disable or enable subpatches/nodes according to the active state.

in application that means you send the current state string and everywhere else you check the string with =(string) aka "does this string equal the one which i'm waiting for here" hence enable/disable the connected nodes.

hey bo, i'll put bezier lines on the wishlist.

Is there any way to tidy the transition lines? I'm making quite a complicated patch and its getting quite messy.

Thanks

Sure, let me just tidy my patch a little.

I never knew you could cluster the automata nodes. Would you be able to explain how to do that? (im new to this)

Thanks

There are a few examples how to use state machine? (E.g. for GUIs ...)
I would like to move in and use it, but its much easier with inspiring examples.

I've seen it, I thought I could do it before.

I think it explains itself, in any case better than the original version, which broke my brain convolutions.

Is the fee for the developer computer, or for each installation?

i heard some ppl use AutomataUI in commercial projects without a license. please be fair and support with the necessary licence buy. thanks.

@u7angel great! this will help to keep complex graphs much more readable :) love this

@princemio, that behaviour comes actually kind of for free. you can set the lock time for a state and just enable the transitions permanently (input pin set to 1) which goes from that state. hence after the state lock time the transition will automatically triggered. i was showing such use case in the node17 automata workshop. checkout the video.

https://youtu.be/I8CmERSoyPc?t=4173
see the Done pin is set to enabled, therefore the done transitions activates once the "switchTopic" state finished its lock time.

does this solve your problem ?

@princemio
happy to hear AutomataUI is helpful for your work :)

@u7angel - god i think i received a mail from you but no im unable to find it - lol - could you please get in contact with me via waltzbinaire.com

thanks bro

hey microdee

what a coincidence, i was thinking about making AutomataUI open source this morning. in case you want to mess with it, tailor it to your needs, complain about my coding style...here it is
https://github.com/wirmachenbunt/AutomataUI

Honestly, i sort of abandoned this project since i'm totally hooked with the interpole project. Therefore its only fair to make it public. it definitely needs some love.

concerning, remotely triggering transitions, yes. one could make a node for that.

and regarding the "frame thinking", yeah that's kinda a taste thing. i totally understand your point. for me automata is more a machine-like-thing rather than a fuzzy animation editor. i wanted it to be precise using frames rather than guessing time (i.e. frame-drops).

well, i know the „oh no‘s“ when looking at your patches ;)

let‘s talk via Riot, i‘m happy to discuss details

@stix
oh, yeah ...that should not be in the release. its empty right now. its planned to use it to change transition time. will have a look at it later the day

just updated my repo how it was meant to be concerning SetTransitionTime. if you use microdees fork, then it does somethingelse maybe. can't tell...

FYI, i adopted microdees TriggerTransition functionality as a node called TriggerTransition
So the only difference between original and fork is thinking in frames or in seconds. i'll stick with frames since it makes more sense for me.

you have the choice :)

i don't understand what you are trying to do here. you want to go (trigger manually) to a state and go back after a certain time ? there are probably several ways to do that. like using lock time of the target state and the transition set to 1.

concerning SetTransitionTime, yeah that's just something i did after microdees fork

and last but not least, the time vs. frame discussion....again :) let's say you want a transition to last 1 frame and your time is based on seconds, you have to calculate and get 0,016666 period . let's say you want to make your transition safe against some other events happening and you want 3 frames...these numbers are harder to compute. furthermore, AutomataUI is first and foremost intended as a logic helper and second to help with animation.

let's switch the thinking, i want to have a nice menu transition of one second and you run on 60 fps...easy, go for a 60 frames transition. or maybe 2 seconds ? a well, lets do the heavy calculation and choose 120 frames. easier to compute, right ?

@microdee, in my world i have constant fps ;)

and mixing monoflop and a statemachine defeats the purpose of a statemachine. why can‘t we just accept there are different needs? you like to work with seconds, totally fine with me.

@eps, sounds to me like two transitions, one for either direction. and each having a time aka timeout ? pingpong doesnt sound right here.

where do i set state/transition timeout? i see only duration

i think i have to find couple of hours and watch the video from node before further discussion.
you mention features which i have no idea about (i.e. require some help/guide/documentaion)

let's rephrase.
we have two states A,B with two corresponding buttons A,B.
if i'm in state A: clicking A does nothing, clicking B goes state B.
if i'm in state B: clicking B does nothing, clicking A goes state A.
if i don't click anything for some period (timeout), system switches to another state.

the latter sounds for me exactly as pingpong ::]
and the former - as two direct ones

the purpose is as simple - two periodically rotating ads, with customer ability to show immediately required one, not waiting till it switches automatically. there are more states in fact, so replacement of A/B buttons by single "go another pingpong state" is not an option - every state must have it's own button.

it's no-brainer with 3 transitions, but requires extra tricks (like dummy intermediate states as velcrome said) with current limit of 2.

@velcrome
thanks for the flower.

in terms of number of transitions, if you already have a route in one direction, why not use that for every case. like using „or“ outside of automata.
not sure why you need an extra state here, sounds complicated.

concerning the enums of transitions, thats just copy pasting microdees code, need to make the enum items unique. no big deal, will be fixed.

edit: just realized there is more unfinished stuff in TriggerTransition, seems not spreadable in the way you would expect it to. will be fixed.

@velcrome, new version with bug fix

Hey Christian,
excellent work :-)

A feature-request from my side, for one of the next updates, would be an undo redo function and an alert warning if I want to delete a state or transition.
If I hit the scrollwheelbutton accidentally over a state I lose the state, the connected transitions and my connections in the patch - would be cool to avoid that. ;-)

Cheers
David

I'm still thinking about differences between qfsm and this great contribution.

Excuse me for that, but there is one more thing next to undo/redo & copy/paste functions.
It's very handy while patching: print a graph and keep the paper in front of you. When you get an idea of changing a state, you can draw it first by a hand and make changes later. I'm actually always do so.

Joreg mode is not bright enought for that :)))

@u7angel Another nice to have: If I want to jump to state in the editor I always move the state circles a little bit while klicking on it with "Crtl" Key. Would be cool to prevent the drag-function while the "Crtl" Key is pressed :-)