51–60 of 155 posts
It helps people who don't identify as programmers/developers program without thinking they're programming.
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…
Everything you wrote is just as true for a well written text program, and untrue for badly written blueprint spaghetti!
The reason blueprints exist in UE is because they needed a way to allow non-expert programmers on the team to write code that isn’t C++, but they didn’t want to use a high level scripting language like Lua.
IIRC, Sweeney said (on Twitter) that in the past, it was a burden to constantly be designing and maintaining language bindings for scripts, especially with a rapidly changing engine.
Also, (I’m guessing here), blueprints result in less bugs since it provides static typing and makes it possible to do some advanced visual debugging. These are things that, even if they were available in a language like Lua, they would be intimidating and/or uncomfortable for the artists/non-programmers on a team. Plus I’d imagine that it’s relatively easy to produce some highly optimized code from blueprints, maybe even compile it to native instructions.
It’s also probably no coincidence that the visual node-based concept is used a lot in other tools used primarily by artists, like for material creation.
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…
There used to be junior programmer positions for people to listen to artists and modify/rebuild the source with different magic numbers. That's a waste of everyone's time.
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…
I think you are only a huge fan of blueprints because they is no alternatives in Unreal. I think if you could compare an Unreal Lua integration to Blueprints you would reach for Lua every time. Everything you wrote is just as true for a well written text program, and untrue for badly written blueprint spaghetti!
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…
I think you are only a huge fan of blueprints because they is no alternatives in Unreal. I think if you could compare an Unreal Lua integration to Blueprints you would reach for Lua every time. Everything you wrote is just as true for a well written text program, and untrue for badly written blueprint spaghetti!
Lua is great and I'm a huge proponent of it but different tools are meant for different use cases.