The Gallery will become a lot more powerful and customizable in v1.3 (coming Friday)

When it comes to your own scenes creation, or to editing saved matches, it will give you a lot more control.

Until now, creating your own scenes / timelines meant they looked slightly different every time you played them. The actions were the same, but each one was resolved just before it played - every time. Which meant it got dynamically and randomly built from all the animation variants it included (just like during a regular match, where this variation is necessary to prevent repetitiveness). There was no way for you to decide what variants should play in an action, or in what order.

I've had a lot of people asking me e.g. how they could make an action last longer. The answer so far has been to add multiple instances of the same action, one after the other. No longer. The updated Gallery gives you full control over the animation variants that play within an action: how many of them, which ones and in what order, the segment that gets played and at what speed. It also allows you to simulate the switch events that could only happen in the live game or in saved matches - e.g. when a character grabs the other's hand before getting slapped and turns the action into a standing test of strength. This could not be recreated manually in the Gallery until now. Now all it takes is to add the standing_slap action and edit the variant segment to end when the hand gets close enough but it's still in the air (one caveat - there's no visual way to do this, so you'll have to go with a bit of trial and error). Then add the standing_test_of_strength action to the other character. And it just works :)

So uuhhhh... complexity?

Well, no. Only if you want it. All this is an added capability that you can also safely ignore if you so wish (it's also hidden within an extension of the user interface, so you're not going to run into it unless you want to).

It will not complicate the way the Gallery operates - and you will be able to use the exact same flows as before. The only difference is that the endurance values have now been moved inside the action variant editor, and there is an Edit button for each action control on the timeline.

By default, when you create an action, it will be the same as before - non-deterministic (dynamically built when playing).

To make it deterministic - and to customize it, press the Edit button, then either increase the number of turns to more than 0, or press the Generate rand. timeline button to generate a valid flow that's within the action's parameters. You can then customize it. You can reassign variants, edit their speed, move them around, add more, etc. Once you're done, the action will play the exact same way you built it - every time, always.

To turn a deterministic action back into a non-deterministic one and allow the engine to again determine how it should play, set its number of turns back to 0.

And of course, you can mix and match deterministic and non-deterministic actions. And save them, just as before.

Well... That's about it. There's quite a bit more coming with the new version, but I'm not going to talk about it yet :)