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Thankfully, Unreal really shines when you combine them both together: C++ and Blueprints. That's when things really start to click.
This is important in games because iteration is so critical to success. Delegating high level logic to visual scripting can allow different people to focus on low level concerns like performance, so both problems can (hopefully) be iterated on in parallel.
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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 really don't get why this is being downvoted, you cannot rely on blueprints alone. If you've ever shipped a game ( and I've invited oneoff786 to share any titles he has released in the past) before. Blueprint simply is not a replacement for programmatic text. Where blueprint shines is strictly limited to animation rigging (what animation to play when a character is doing what or response to user control) and visual…
If 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…
I’ve been trying to clarify my own opinion on this in words for awhile now and what you’ve written is pretty much what I think too. I hate coding stuff that I know could be better expressed with a visual graph or say, an animation curve. As a software dev on a team I view my job as making tools that the actual game designers and artists can then use to make better games with less effort and while having more fun doin…
I hate coding animations in CSS, but I enjoy watching them in e.g. devtools. I really wish I could see the representation of my code visually more often. Immediate mode UIs are sort of like this, but I've rarely seen tools which actually show while coding.
We unit test (or try to) every new feature, why shouldn't we be able to visualize them too?
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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.
With the availability of game engines, gameplay programming is actually very high-level. Most of the logic is handling some input or some collision or updating some position or timer every frame. The more complex parts of a game (collisions, physics simulation, rendering, asset management, networking, etc.) is handled by the game engine itself, so the games programmer usually only need to interface with the high-leve…
There, I've said it. Most 'games' are in fact interactive movies, with very little game in them. That's what Game Engines enable.
I'm vote we stop calling them Game Engines and instead call them Interactive Movie Engines.
> The more complex parts of a game (collisions, physics simulation, rendering, asset management, networking, etc.) is handled by the game engine itself,
This is and always was a Bad Idea, let me bring up a very simple example for you, a racing simulator. What sets apart an arcade from a realistic car driving sim? It's not really the graphics, or "gameplay", its the physics engine.
You might argue "oh that's just knobs on the physics engine" - maybe. But the way you handle the graphics, the whole game, even, hinges on how well you have tuned that engine. I don't care how many artists or designers you have - adding doodads to a realsitic racing sim isn't going to make it more fun. And if your arcade gameplay isn't spot on, no amount of "gameplay tweaks" is going to fix your jank arcade racing game.
Game Engines don't really make for building racing sims. They make Ok FPS or world exploration templates, but you kinda want to not even care about assets in these types of games - and they are all geared at creating assets spitting, 10000 collectible doodad dumping, absolute messes.
We have it in UE, Blender, Spark AR to name a few, which are mostly used by creatives who might not have much of a programming experience, to create amazing results.
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Whether you identify as a programmer or not should not prevent you from having a good tool for the work. Even the very polished Blueprints in Unreal are not as good as a text based programming.
I agree with you. But the "content creators" who are responsible for most of modern game development will flee in horror from anything that looks too much like programming. If you want to market a game engine with customizable behavior (i.e., it's programmable) to large AAA game dev teams where programmers are only a small subset of the whole team, you have to provide a way to allow people to program the engine witho…
I think you are trying to say the blueprints in unreal were created to "hide" programming with a nice interface, and you could be right, but I suspect the reason they exists is a lot less thought out.
I suspect there are just some very talented engineers at Epic who really like visual programming and wanted to explore how powerful they can be. I think what they have created is amazing. Watching the flow of execution and the debugging really blows me away.
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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 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. Sure, that's pretty clear :). If you want to re-read my post above I wasn't saying that would be as good at game rules and there's a very real limitation as soon as you get away from scripted encounters and into anything more complex. At the same time consider there may be pe…
The only reason I commented at all was because the OP listed a bunch of stuff that was good in blueprints, but I believe all those things are good in text too.