Afternoon fellow modders.

I'm wondering if you guys who are well versed with SM can offer me some advice as to how optimised my Nodes are. Here is a screenshot.

http://i1159.photobucket.com/albums/p628/B1gBadDaddy/SMNodes.png

The conditions I have on the Branch Node are the same as the Quest Node, but with a Global needing to be at 1, and obviously without the animal condition, which is on the Quest Node. The individual quests under each Quest Node have no conditions. They run solely based off of the conditions on the nodes themselves.

These nodes track kills for animals. When a Deer is killed for example, the Deer Quest Node runs the Deer Killed quest. This in turn updates a tracked stat (global variable). I have each animal set up with their own Quest Nodes. What I'm thinking though, is if it would be better to have just 1 Quest Node, and have all of the animals killed quests inside that one Quest Node; obviously with the correct conditions set up for each quest.

I have no idea how much overhead my current nodes will have on the game, or how much they would if they were all stacked inside a single Quest Node.

Appreciate any advice you guys can offer

I think the best way to do this would be to have one quest node as you said, set the node as stacked but don't tick the shares event box. Then when a kill actor event is sent to the story manager, it will check the conditions of the first quest and if that fails the next quest's conditions will be checked and so on... But when a quest's conditions are satisfied, that single quest will start and the other quest's conditions will not be checked (which is what you want).

The way you have it now, I think all the nodes conditions will be checked every time a kill actor event is sent to the story manager.

I think that is the way the story manager works but I am not certain... Give my way a try if you are interested and see if it works. I am only starting three quests with the story manager at the moment but that figure will likely be ten times greater when I finish my mod so I am interested in optimizing my nodes.