Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
godotengine.org
Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
1–10 of 113 posts
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#2Does this mean they are also removing the VisualShader as well? Or purely the scripting part?
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#3Refreshingly clear upfront explanation with data backing it and with alternative paths explained. (even if you can dispute the self-selection in the poll) I like their communication.
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#4Does this mean they are also removing the VisualShader as well? Or purely the scripting part?
It seems likely that enough people use VisualShader to justify its existance. It is also common to define shaders visually, for instance in Blender.
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#5Seems like implicitly it's better to take notes from current users than actual users, since your first effort might not be what the potential users expect.
Ive only poked at godot, is there a reason that GDscript is so dominant?
ETA: is the IDE based around it, or other things aren't well supported, or is visual scripting something that just doesn't fit godot's model
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#6Reading between the lines:
It seems like one of the primary reasons why Blueprints are well-loved in Unreal Engine, is that the only mainstream alternative is full-on c++ (and it's not an easy c++ codebase to work with).
But without that pressure of limited choice, blueprint visual scripting seems to have a hard time gaining ground in godot.
I do wonder how much of this is because godot's visual scripting never got the polish it needed, and how much is because gdscript is a superior approach.
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#7Seems like implicitly it's better to take notes from current users than actual users, since your first effort might not be what the potential users expect. Ive only poked at godot, is there a reason that GDscript is so dominant? ETA: is the IDE based around it, or other things aren't well supported, or is visual scripting something that just doesn't fit godot's model
Visual scripting works reasonably well for very high level scripting, but even then it is very "verbose and space inefficient". Writing actual game logic requires a lot of moving stuff around even for small changes. It is also hard to share in our text-first world, so helping or getting community help on it ends up in attachment hell or trading screenshots, both of which are not ideal.
As the blog post says, it can probably work better in something like Unreal because the engine already has a lot of things that Godot (and Unity and other similar engines, for that matter) simply does not aim to support. Just as an example, Unreal has a centralized concept of "health" and "dying", so they can provide default libraries to handle the minutia of such things (can health go negative? is "dead" a recoverable state? etc)
As for why GDScript specifically is the most popular choice, it's both due to community and due to the engine's design itself. Being literally made for the engine, Godot and GDScript have ver closely tied semantics, which are a (a little) bit more boilerplate-y to handle with GDNative-based alternatives. And since it's such less hassle (and until recently was near the only option), most of the community has built learning materials and libraries optimized for that use.
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#8I am not surprised by this and I'm glad they chose to discontinue it. It was never very good and even to a complete beginner it's nowhere near as easy to use as GDScript. This should free up some development budget for more important features.
Visual scripting has never been very good for general purpose programming in my opinion. They don't really represent continuity in an intuitive way and it gets worse when you're dealing with function with many parameters. Shader graphs are probably the one exception to this because they provide a pseudo debugging facility where you get to see how materials change after different operations.
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#9Reading between the lines: It seems like one of the primary reasons why Blueprints are well-loved in Unreal Engine, is that the only mainstream alternative is full-on c++ (and it's not an easy c++ codebase to work with). But without that pressure of limited choice, blueprint visual scripting seems to have a hard time gaining ground in godot. I do wonder how much of this is because godot's visual scripting never got t…
While looking into new engines recently I bailed on Unreal because all the docs and tutorials push towards Blueprint. I'd happily use C++ over Blueprint but everything is pushing Blueprint hard to the point I just moved on. Been looking at Godot lately and I really like it and if I need something more than GDScript provides there are bindings to GDNative. I think for some people Visual scripting is probably nice but for me it's an inscrutable mess of flow charts that's way more difficult to use, debug, build understanding of quickly, etc.
Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting
#10Does this mean they are also removing the VisualShader as well? Or purely the scripting part?
It seems likely that enough people use VisualShader to justify its existance. It is also common to define shaders visually, for instance in Blender.
Composition based approaches also apply particularly well to shaders, since their main drawback being lack of control flow is not a big issue for shaders.