Beginner

Beginner

If you are not familiar at all with unity I suggest you start with the interface tutorials first (Less than an hour). I assume that you are at least familiar with it.

Overview

What will I learn?

• How to setup constellation.
• The basics of the interface.
• How to use live editing
• How nodes works.
• How to see nodes help.
• Understanding script execution order

What do I need?

• You need the latest version of unity
• When your unity is installed, you can Download or clone the repo.
• Open the project with unity 2017.3.
• Open the constellation Window (Constellation/editor).

The interface

The editor

• Constellation tab: Currently open constellation
• Node selection panel: The node list. Click one in the list to add it
• Node editor: Where you edit your scripts

Assigning your script to a GameObject

• Add a Constellation behaviour component to your GameObject
• Add your Constellation script the script field.

Live profiling

• Open the flappy bird example scene.
• Make sure you have the constellation editor opened (Window/Constellation editor).
• Hit play.
• Click on the gameobject you want to profile (in this case I suggest selecting Pref_Bird).
• You should see live the bird values.

Integrated documentation

• Click on the question mark on a node to get more informations about it and examples.

Scripting principles

Anatomy of a node

• Inputs set variables in the node.
• Outputs are the result.
• A Variable is either a number, a string, an array, an object, or a list of variable (Very similar to the war in javascript).
• A Unity variable is an object which inherits from unity object (Example transform, GameObject, Component).
• Links allow you to connect a node output to a node input.

Understanding warm and cold

• A cold input is used to set a variable. It does not trigger an output.​

• A warm input will trigger an output.
• A warm output is triggered without warm input. For example keyDown node will trigger an output because a key is pressed.
• A cold output is triggered only when a warm input receives a message.

Understand script Execution order.

• In constellation nodes are executed from top to bottom.
• To test that just add a word node and a print node. Enter in the attribute field "Word 1" and connect it to the print.
• Add an other word node, place it bellow the previous word, set the field to "Word 2" and connect it to the print node.
• Select your cube make sure your constellation editor is opened and hit play!
• You should see in the console

Word 1

Word 2

• Stop playing.
• Now try to put the word 2 node on top of the word 1.
• You will see now that word 2 is printing before word 1.

Word 2

Word 1