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Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

#41

Post by picture »

oneoff786 wrote: post #12

I’m a huge fan of blueprints. A few things it does well: * makes the engine api very discoverable, which is huge. It’s a step above intellisense and auto complete. The api is likely the reason it’s so dominate in games. It’s the bulk of game programming. Visual programming isn’t very good for coding new things from scratch. * let’s you read code and clearly follow execution from start to finish. * let’s you visually…

Super pedantic and unimportant nitpick: I think you mean to use "lets" instead of "let's", which is a contraction of "let us"

Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

#42

Post by rex64 »

I'm not sure if it's really that popular but Visual Programming gives the ability for designers to quickly implement their ideas without having to ask and waiting for a programmer to implement them via code.

For example, in the case of Unreal Engine, gameplay programmers build the basic blocks via C++, and game designers can access them via Blueprint (Unreal Engine's visual programming tool).

Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

#43

Post by vvanders »

drakonka wrote: post #7

On the larger game teams I've worked on, most people using blueprints and schematics aren't the programmers but the content creators. The programmers are providing said blueprint elements/building blocks as well as extending (or modifying) the engine with other logic that content creators don't need access to via their visual tools. For example: a level designer might want a specific type of entity in their level (le…

Yep, and Kismet before that. The usual consumers are designers and tech artists, at least in the teams I was on.

Previous to that we also heavily leveraged Lua coroutines as a form of literate programming/game "script". Since the coroutines would execute in a linear manner(with yield() where it handed execution back to the engine) it was really powerful for scripted sequences.

Another interesting area is industrial/PLC programming. The parallels between what we did in gamedev and ladder programming was striking. Visual state representation, online edit-deploy-debug. I'm fairly confident you could give a designer a copy of a ladder editor connected to a game engine and they would have no problem scripting out a sequence.

Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

#44

Post by qwery »

It's an exceedingly popular way of writing materials/shaders in 3D content tools -- I'd guess more so than any game programming/logic (of course big game engines tend to have visual shader tools as well)

It can be (usually is) far less intimidating than text-based coding. Compare:

- a text editor with a hello-world template script, a whole keyboard and now the engine yells at you because you (bravely) did something trivial to start, like adding a blank line in between "hello" and "world"

- a canvas with a big "add node" button which brings up a list of verbs and nouns organised into native-language categories

Asynchronous code can be hard to follow. Visual programming / node graphs are actually pretty good at representing complicated asynchronous logic.

I think this is pretty closely related to why diagrams / drawing / whiteboards are commonly cited as helpful by programmers.

I haven't used Unreal Blueprints. I have used Unreal (3, UDK) Kismet which is not particularly related (to Blueprints) other than the "Unreal" part, AFAIK. It was quite capable for most level design scripting logic, but was not ideal for implementing new mechanics for example. You could also copy nodes in/out as plaintext which I always appreciated as a feature I don't see very often.

Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

#45

Post by jay_kyburz »

I think its only because Unreal has one, and everybody wants to be like Unreal.

I think Lua in Roblox, or the Godot's python like language, or Unity's C# is strictly better in every way.

Visual Programming languages don't prevent "non programmers" from writing really weird code that makes no sense.

You will find many first time programmers that like visaul programming because they created something cool in Unreal. I think if there was a Lua integration they would have achieved more, faster.

We use words to communicate our thoughts in comments on Hacker News. What would our communication be like if we only had flow charts you could plug variables into?

Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

#47

Post by jaimex2 »

Simple, it appeals to a demographic with an interest in gaming but not coding.

I think its great. We lost a lot of culture on the web when Flash was killed. Every site looks like the same sterile cookie cut bootstrap today.

I can't remember the last time a site pleasantly surprised me with a creative rendition.

I despise Apple and Adobe for it.

Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

#49

Post by jay_kyburz »

SN76477 wrote: post #21
lostgame wrote: post #8

Why the heck wouldn't it be? Game design - especially in 3D environments - is an incredibly visual process! Unless you are incredibly familiar with programming to start - why, if you were approaching game design, and - for instance - had level layouts, character and enemy designs, etc - prepared in advance - wouldn't you? It's literally the most logical way to approach filling in those gaps with functionality with a…

I love this answer. . . There is really something to be said about context. Thank you for your this!!

That answer would make only make sense if you did the programming in the 3d scene.

Game Design is not visual at all, it's pure logic. "when I pull the trigger, find the thing I am pointing at, if it has armor, reduces its health by 10, otherwise reduce its health by 20"

Game Art is all visual. Red is scary, green is good, sort of.

They are completely separate paradigms.

Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?

#50

Post by jay_kyburz »

sk0g wrote: post #38
hamiltonians wrote: post #36

i hate visual programing if i am the customer. slow, crashes, buggy. the lower the code, the better tbe program, but obviously harder.

Not sure what any of those complaints have to do with visual programming. BPs are pretty fast, and efficient BPs will be faster than inefficient C++ for example. Crashes and bugs are hardly unique to visual programming either.

I think he means BP are very slow to create, and hard to read and navigate
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