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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?

#111

Post by pjmlp »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #99
bitwize wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't know who these "content creators" are that flee from programming, but I have never met or even heard of one. If you mean writers and artists, then sure, but you don't want them working on your game logic anyhow. If you can understand what is going on in visual code, you can understand what is going on in text code. I think you are trying to say the blueprints in unreal were created to "hide" programming with…

I bet there are a couple of talks on the subject at GDC Vault, so they are relatively easy to find out.

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

#113

Post by baal80spam »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #50
sk0g wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, I think he means that the product of visual programming is often slow and buggy. Which I can agree with to a point - there is a price to pay for all these abstractions. From my own experience - the closer to the metal a product, the more performant and stable it is.

In the past I was sure that game engines were an impossible tool in the field of engineering where the performance matters so much. Clearly, I was wrong (in large part because of the hardware improvements).

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

#114

Post by mcv »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #87
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I know people with debilitating ADHD who nonetheless manage to communicate more clearly and correctly than their peers. Since you're throwing accusations at random people online, are you sure you aren't dyslexic or lazy? By the way, spell checkers are a thing these days. Seriously, check it out. People you write to might appreciate the absolutely microscopic amount of effort it takes to check what you're typing.

Spell checkers are often terrible, and are just as capable of introducing errors as fixing them, and don't always catch grammar errors like lets vs let's.

Look, I care a great deal about proper spelling and grammar, and put a lot of effort into it, but errors can still happen (I've noticed I've been making more spelling errors in recent years than I used to, which worries me). Your comment just sounds needlessly dismissive of people with dyslexia. You could also put effort into proper spelling without trying to come off as a dick (which frankly is probably worse than bad spelling).

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

#115

Post by Netcob »

Before I learned how to program, I used this software called "Klik&Play", later replaced by "Multimedia Fusion". This was over 20 years ago, but apparently the software still exists and works in a similar way:

For the logic, you get a table where every column is essentially a class, and each row is an if-then construct. The first column can be a condition, implicitly called once per frame, or an event with an optional condition. In each cell you can add actions that should be called on the instances of the class for its column. Everything is selected through simple dialogs.

For example, you'd make a condition/event like "Bullet collides with enemy", then add an action "Destroy" under "Bullet" and "Enemy" classes, something like "Play 'boom.wav'" under the "Sound" class, and "Add 1" to some "Counter" class. If I recall correctly that is.

This ended up getting me into programming, because I was able to quickly achieve results while being able to start experimenting with the UI before reading a single tutorial or any sort of document. I think discoverability is the killer feature. I could easily see that instead of destroying an entity, I could spawn another one. Or I could create an entity at the point of the collision, so I'd animate an explosion effect. But the explosion would just stay around, so I looked around what I could do... found an "Animation ended" event, so I simply made another rule that would destroy the explosion object when its animation ended. And so on.

I think another reason is that game logic is messy yet simple. So you don't want a lot of boilerplate code or having it scattered across lots of files, otherwise you're not getting a good overview. But I can't vouch for modern visual programming languages to solve that problem since I haven't really tried them.

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

#116

Post by zozbot234 »

echelon wrote: post #106
smaudet wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game Engines Suck. 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 B…

> There, I've said it. Most 'games' are in fact interactive movies, with very little game in them. That's what Game Engines enable. While I disagree with your argument about game engines being bad for games, you bring up an interesting point. Game engines are becoming cinematic movie engines. Right now, they're a bit sub-standard. They shouldn't be built for consumer hardware at all, but rather live in the cloud wher…

This seems backwards to me, since live action film is a lot more expensive than CGI animation. It's true that high-quality cameras and video editing software have become more of a cheap commodity, but this does almost nothing to impact the actual factors that push the cost of live action film up. Look at what people post on video sites, that's a far better representation of what's actually "cheap" in video.

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

#117

Post by Biganon »

victorbstan wrote: post #93
tomatowurst wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

Fascinating input, thank you.

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

#118

Post by lqet »

Netcob wrote: post #115

Before I learned how to program, I used this software called "Klik&Play", later replaced by "Multimedia Fusion". This was over 20 years ago, but apparently the software still exists and works in a similar way: For the logic, you get a table where every column is essentially a class, and each row is an if-then construct. The first column can be a condition, implicitly called once per frame, or an event with an optiona…

Ha, I also started with programming using Klik&Play when I was around 9! I only had the free shareware version, and if I recall correctly, it was not possible to use custom variables or if/then/else constructs in the free version. You had to be creative to somehow store the game state using only the position of objects, and then using collisions to decide on an action. Since you could spawn objects at arbitrary locations, you could use this to do primitive geometrical if/then/else branching. I also remember that you could generate a single exe file which you could give to your friends. I created so many DynaBlaster clones and other Jump&Run games.

A while later I accidentally stumbled over the BASIC interpreter of DOS and was amazed how easy everything was there - you could just store a number in a variable and directly do stuff depending on its value!

For anyone interested, here is a (bad quality) video from the 90ies explaining the software on Windows 3.1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUTpumYboDs

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

#119

Post by dazzawazza »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #62
beebmam wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly are alternatives in Unreal. You can implement everything (and far more) in C++ without ever needing to use blueprints.

Compiling C++ is not a alternative to a game scripting language. Unreal doesn't provide first party support for any other form of scripting.

It barely provides human-time-scale compilation!

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

#120

Post by bob1029 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #54
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…

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!

Despite limitations, if you can find ways to simply tolerate these techniques, you will find that you then automatically empower others on your team.

I agree this is a shitty way to manage complexity, but at the same time it's super intuitive for lots of people. Maybe find ways to apply it conservatively and guide the non-hardcore emacs users down a path that won't drive you mad.

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