Comment by corysama

> visualizing transitions

In systems where we used this it was common to have 100+ states x 100+ events. Visualizing that would have been fun, but not useful.

One implementation had layerable sheets. So, you could define a base state sheet and multiple overlay sheet that the game could enable dynamically on major changes.

Within each event column there would be long, broken up runs of "do the same thing" for runs of states. So, you could define a chunk of code in a cell below the main table and reference it in the runs and it would show in the main table.

Almost all functions were trivial. 1 or 2 statements. "Modify a value. TransitionToState X". There would be hundreds of these little snippets in a sheet. Naming each one would double the complexity for no gain. Let alone having function signatures. They'd all be `void randomName(event)`. And, Lua's a dynamic language. You aren't going to get much error checking in an IDE. Better to just keep everything local to the sheet rather than flipping between Excel and VSCode.

And, in the implementation discussed above, most of the cells were full of numeric/string values or references to assets.