Forum Posts Feed
Best software for visually diagramming a series of martial art strategies?
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by digeratus
Jan 20, 2023 at 04:14 AM
I’m in a martial art, and I’m looking for software that would help me diagram my strategies in different sparring situations. I want this to be a visual diagram.
It should allow me to show, say:
I) if I’m in stance X and my opponent is stance Y
A) I can do this
a) he can react with A
1) to which I can do blah
2) or something else
b) or he can react with B
1) to which I can do something
2) or something else
B) or I can do this
C) or I can do this
II) whereas if I’m in stance Y and he’s also in Y
III) or if I’m in stance Y and he’s in X
etc.
But I want to be able to have “situations” which can be referred to in multiple places in the diagram… (e.g. he has my sleeve and lapel, and I have his), since many situations would be reachable via multiple roads. Those shouldn’t need to be duplicated.
And it would also be useful to have searchable attributes automatically added: e.g. show all decision nodes that are “children” of a certain grip position… even if those children are in radically different branches of the map.
And finally it would be great if I could also in this visual scheme easily link to other relevant info (e.g. drop in a video clip of a technique).
I want to be able to start creating the drawing from anywhere (in other words, start inputting a random situation in) and then insert it into the flow anywhere I like, or into multiple places.
Does this all make sense? Any ideas about the best software for this sort of thing? Flowchart? Mindmap? Infinite whiteboard? Something else? Any particular recs?
Posted by Amontillado
Jan 20, 2023 at 12:31 PM
It’s expensive, but Flying Logic is designed for what-if and decision tree modeling. You might take a look at it.
Posted by Andy Brice
Jan 20, 2023 at 01:37 PM
I think a flowchart would be your best bet. There must be any number of those to choose from.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 20, 2023 at 01:59 PM
This is actually a very sophisticated requirement – one you’d normally want dedicated software to achieve. Knowing a bit about martial arts myself, I can see a whole lot of ramifications of the various scenarios you’ve described. Not least, how best to describe them so users can “hook in” to the bits most immediately relevant to what they’re trying to do. The combination of visual flows plus an underlying database for instant referencing is already complex – the option to fork into multiple possible responses, and then immediately fork again, well, that’s really heavyweight stuff. That’s because certain paths are going to converge with some paths, while other paths are going to diverge into their own specific areas. So you’ve got to take duplication/repetition into account as well.
I’m not at all convinced Flying Logic is powerful enough to do this – but it may be. Whether it also supports the appropriate visualisation I don’t know. I can’t immediately think of any software that could do what you’re describing, although I can think of various software components that could be combined to build a tool for this kind of visualisation.
Any programmers in the forum with insights into the underlying requirements?
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 21, 2023 at 09:44 PM
This is a very interesting use case!
I can understand the technical requirements, but I think that the actual visual rendering may be quite important in making the end result usefully inteligible.
Could you point us to 1-2 examples of an image which you consider suitable? It could be from a different thematic area, i.e., non martial-arts related.
digeratus wrote:
>But I want to be able to have “situations” which can be referred to in
>multiple places in the diagram… (e.g. he has my sleeve and lapel, and
>I have his), since many situations would be reachable via multiple
>roads. Those shouldn’t need to be duplicated.