Sure there’s quite a bit so I’ll need some time to prepare. Is there a good email address for sending projects or should I just upload publicly and remove the paid flow/node source?

Update

Today I implemented flow canvas in another existing project and reworked my objects into prefab variants with flow canvas controllers and everything went as expected no errors. So whatever I’m doing with the custom task must just be throwing a wrench in the whole thing.

I went back to the project I submitted earlier and did some more testing. If you unpack the prefab completely it will run, I even filled out some flow scripts and everything was fine.

The moment I set it up as a prefab I start getting errors so I think there’s some issues with the serialization of node canvas I’m triggering somehow but flow canvas does seem to be up and running in 2018.3 =D

I did however notice that the way blackboard variables work ( forgive me if I’m misunderstanding what’s happening ) are not compatible with prefab variant workflows since they’re stored as a single string which explains some of my confusion about data loss there. I might suggest storing them as individual json parts during edit and creating a final serialized string separately to use at runtime. This would be a great addition! In the mean time I’m going to try my hand at extending the blackboard to support this.

I managed to hack it in =P

No worries we’re all busy. I’m using flowcanvas in two different 2018.3 projects and at this point I’m feeling pretty comfy with it’s current prefab pitfalls.

My soultion works just fine ( I’ve made some fixes to it locally since posting though ) except when I deserialize it doesn’t populate object references even though I’m passing it the known object collection and I can’t understand why.

Out of this issue came an actually really handy component. I create a new blackboard component that extends from the vanilla one called “CommonBlackboard”. I put this on my root prefab game object and it holds common variables that exist for all variants but may not have any actual data yet ( as this is the job of the variant to populate with specifics ).

Then the blackboard variables throughout the prefab go look at the common blackboard during editor time ( I create a static MenuItem function that loops through all prefabs and attempts to resolve and then save those assets) using another component CommonBlackboardLoader which lives with the vanilla blackboard.

A bit complicated maybe but it’s been working really well for me. I would say that having something to make blackboards and prefab variants / nested prefabs managable is a must going forward otherwise it breaks a lot of desired workflow. Though you can probably find something more clever than my solution above. The same is true for the actual flow scripts, they are not variant compatible but I think this is less important and just using the asset version instead of bound is fine. It works and doesn’t break the workflow.

And yes it was like that in my actual projects too – it fails to play every other time like clockwork. Very odd.

Anyways if there’s any other information I can provide to help with your 2018.3 update please ask away – I’ve also gotten quite comfy with the new prefab system and PrefabUtility if that info can be of help to you in any way.

Even though I’m an experienced programmer flow canvas has helped me move away from writing lots of specific scripts and instead going with data driven events and I’m pretty happy with it!

( and as a side note if you started a discord server I would hang out and help answer questions )