Custom flownodes

To summarize, CryENGINE provides many useful nodes by default, encompassing a whole range of functionality. However, as a programmer, you'll often find that designers will request access to some hidden functionality that the flowgraph isn't capable of providing by default.

For example, let's say you're creating a role-playing game, and you have an experience system. There are plenty of ways to reward the player with experience in the code you've written, but a level designer also wants to be able to make use of this functionality at arbitrary points in a level.

In this situation, you're well-placed to create a custom flownode; you can create a simplified representation of the system that exists in code, perhaps allowing the designer to simply specify the number of experience points to award to the player when the node is triggered.

For now though, we're going to take a look at something a little simpler. Let's pretend we have no existing CryENGINE nodes to work with, and we'd like to implement the Math:Mul node we saw earlier. To recap, it's just a simple node that implements multiplication inside a flowgraph.