I think part if it stems from how multidisciplinary a game studio can be. In my experience, visual programming languages allow people with minimal programming experience (artists, designers, etc) to implement ideas. Im willing to bet onboarding someone with a visual language like Unreal’s blueprints is a much better time than trying to teach them C++. I also find prototyping, especially collaborative prototyping, to be easier with visual languages; its easier to “follow the fun” when all it takes is a drag-and-drop to change some logic.
Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
71–80 of 155 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#72If you want a hands on answer OP, download Blender and follow the donut tutorial on YouTube. As a software engineer with 10+ years of experience, the geometry nodes in Blender just make sense[1]. The comparison here is your are creating a 3D object from scratch, just like a game designer would create a 3D scene from scratch.
[1] It's a form of visual programming.
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
UnrealScript had problems, that why they dropped it 10 years ago.
Sure but as far as scripting languages go it was enough to get the job done at the time. I don't think swapping to Lua would fundamentally change that. I say that as someone who's worked on both sides and shipped production Lua, Unreal script and C++ during that era. Visual scripting/programming tools are for your designers/artists/animators or as glue code between content that is under high iteration cycles. You can…
I'm also in the industry as an artist, level designer and gameplay programmer and have shipped games in Unreal 2, 3 and 4 and Unity, and you'll never convince me that creating boxes and wiring them up will ever be as good as text at expressing game logic and game rules.
I can understand why you might want to use it for shaders. (but not really)
And when it comes to placing volumes and marking up the scene I'll absolutely want visual gizmos.
I genuinely believe that if Epic had taken all the effort they put into blueprints, and put it into a text based programming environment, game designers would be more productive.
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Super pedantic and unimportant nitpick: I think you mean to use "lets" instead of "let's", which is a contraction of "let us"
Quoted post unavailable.
> there is no excuse for such errors
You do realize that common mental conditions like ADHD cause people to commit these "syntax errors" in language all the time, right? What an ignorant, ableist, and frankly pathetic take this is.
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is extremely popular. From Flowgraph in CryEngine to Godot's VisualScript. Even Unity bought the most popular visual scripting asset package, Bolt, and made it standard for all Unity plans. You could also critically think your way to googling "game dev visual scripting" which would tell you much of the same information.
Also in game-engine adjacent spaces blender, and Houdini have similar visual languages.
Oh nice, I didn't realize Blender had a visual scripting system. I knew that they had a Python API like Maya, but the visual stuff is a nice feature to have for art teams. I keep telling myself I'm going to force myself to learn Blender one day. It seems to have really matured over the years.
From a quick glance it reminds me of Unreal Niagara, or Unity Visual Effect Graph. Pretty cool.
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#76What seems to help is that Epic came up with a modular blueprint system. Blender used to have a game engine, with blocks connected via wires, but the entire game was in one giant diagram. Epic blueprints tend to be of modest size.
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
> there is no excuse for such errors You do realize that common mental conditions like ADHD cause people to commit these "syntax errors" in language all the time, right? What an ignorant, ableist, and frankly pathetic take this is.
thank you
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#78Graphs fit well with functional code styles. Art and games have a lot of places where a functional style makes sense.
Games are usually heavily pre-allocated and work tends towards per frame computation operating on a pre-allocated state. Again, this leans into the functional style and thus an easy graphical style.
You can write behavior trees that run per frame without a lot of hidden state. You can write shader graphs as shaders also happen to be very functional in style.
It also helps that the field attracts very visual people by nature.
It's also a graphical field by nature. A console might make sense for some programs but a graphical interface with a built in graphical output makes more sense when you're operating on meshes and textures and such.
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#79If you can use a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for a task, or in this case a Domain Specific Modelling Language (DSML), why wouldn't you use one? It's no different from using SQL for database access. Basically, someone has to do a ton of upfront work designing a domain specific language for a task, in this case game scripting then it's easier for people to do the game scripting using the domain specific language tha…
Well sure, but the question is why are graphical languages the DSL of choice?
Re: Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but as far as scripting languages go it was enough to get the job done at the time. I don't think swapping to Lua would fundamentally change that. I say that as someone who's worked on both sides and shipped production Lua, Unreal script and C++ during that era. Visual scripting/programming tools are for your designers/artists/animators or as glue code between content that is under high iteration cycles. You can…
I'm also in the industry as an artist, level designer and gameplay programmer and have shipped games in Unreal 2, 3 and 4 and Unity, and you'll never convince me that creating boxes and wiring them up will ever be as good as text at expressing game logic and game rules. I can understand why you might want to use it for shaders. (but not really) And when it comes to placing volumes and marking up the scene I'll absolu…
And is kind of what they’re doing now with their Verse language.