Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting • Hacker News Board

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#21

Post by zubspace » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 4:35 AM UTC

I am really looking forward to Godot 4. GDScript improved a lot.

I'm mostly excited about callables (function pointers), easier signal handling in combination with await (former yields) and an improved tweening system. The scripting environment inside of the editor with inbuilt documentation, code completion and debugger is really an achievement.

The only thing I miss are static typing and refactoring tools. You can use type hints, but you need to fall back to dynamic typing at some places for example because there are no generic collections.

Therefore I'm quite excited about the dotnet6 branch being merged into main a few days ago [1]. This is a huge step and will probably make some unity developers consider Godot for their next game.

Also there's GDExtension, the successor of GDNative, which will make it easier to integrate C++ code [2].

I could never imagine myself using Visual Scripting, because you can express yourself so much easier in Code.

[1] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/64089

[2] https://godotengine.org/article/introducing-gd-extensions

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#22

Post by TillE » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 4:47 AM UTC

subb wrote: post #16

hgs3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find it perplexing that Unreal ditched Unreal Script in favor of Blueprints and full C++.

Engineers wants C++, scripters and artists wants Visual Scripting. Seems like an obvious choice to make everyone happy instead of trying to find a middle ground where nobody is?

I've been a C++ developer for 20 years, and when I was playing around with UE4 back when it was first released, I found both options to be extremely clunky.

There's a lot to be said for C#, at the very least. I know a ton of not-very-technical people who have learned enough C# to write simple Unity games.

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#23

Post by vvanders » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

hresvelgr wrote: post #8

I 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'r…

You see it surface in SCADA/PLCs in the form of Ladder programming and Function Block Diagrams. That said from what I understand industry is trending towards more text based approaches lately.

As an ex-gamedev it was interesting to see the overlap there when getting into a bit more serious automation stuff. Edit/deploy live, visual representation of state(which is where ladder excels) and other things we used to do a lot of in game dev was present, but on physical running hardware connected to other sensors/endpoints.

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#24

Post by matesz » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 5:32 AM UTC

For newcommers to this subject, I really recommend watching this video [1]. It compares C++ vs Blueprints in UE. The author behind it has lot of game programming overview videos. I'm not that much into video watching since it's much harder to jump between sections than in textual content, but still these are really really good.

Also, maybe in a little bit different space is enso.org - visual real time etl. People behind it have just received series A funding. You can design pipeline using visual editor (built in rust btw., however it doesn't work that well yet imo) and custom built programming language [2]. I think you can even go from textual representation to visual and back, not 100% on that one though.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMZftEVDuCE [2] https://enso.org/docs/syntax

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#25

Post by jay_kyburz » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 5:51 AM UTC

snarfy wrote: post #18

phire wrote: post #6

Reading 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…

Epic is working on verse script now. Even they realized visual scripting is not the best way to do development. It's very limiting. I was much happier with UE when it had unrealscript. I still do game development on the old engines, but I don't like doing anything with the new engines that force you into c++ or blueprints. Code is simply more expressive than flow charts.

Where did you read about verse? Last I heard about it was Carlos talking about it in a video a few years ago. I haven't heard anything since.

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#26

Post by MattRix » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 5:57 AM UTC

jay_kyburz wrote: post #25

snarfy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epic is working on verse script now. Even they realized visual scripting is not the best way to do development. It's very limiting. I was much happier with UE when it had unrealscript. I still do game development on the old engines, but I don't like doing anything with the new engines that force you into c++ or blueprints. Code is simply more expressive than flow charts.

Where did you read about verse? Last I heard about it was Carlos talking about it in a video a few years ago. I haven't heard anything since.

They seem to be designing it to launch with their special Fortnite version of the Unreal Editor which is supposed to launch sometime this year.

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#27

Post by Beltalowda » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 6:02 AM UTC

gridspy wrote: post #20

snarfy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epic is working on verse script now. Even they realized visual scripting is not the best way to do development. It's very limiting. I was much happier with UE when it had unrealscript. I still do game development on the old engines, but I don't like doing anything with the new engines that force you into c++ or blueprints. Code is simply more expressive than flow charts.

I really liked unrealscript. Part of my love was how both object State and networking were first class features of the language. You could override a function based on "is the current object in the idle or shooting" state TRIVIALLY.

I found its use of inheritance very confusing; could be quite hard to figure out what something does exactly because it could be in one of the 6 parent classes. The experience turned me off from OOP for many years (later nuanced to just inheritance rather than all of OOP).

I was also very much a beginner back in the late 90s/early 00s (my only previous experience was BASIC), so I'd probably struggle less now, but from what I recall it definitely overdid it on the inheritance (which, to be fair, was still fairly new back then).

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#28

Post by johnfn » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 6:21 AM UTC

scrame wrote: post #5

Seems 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

> Ive only poked at godot, is there a reason that GDscript is so dominant?

GDScript is excellent. I was a huge skeptic of it at first - in fact, if you dig through my reddit account I wrote a huge screed about why it could never succeed when it was first announced like 5+ years ago. The Godot team totally proved me wrong - GDScript is really really good. It's super productive to work in - you can bang out features super quickly.

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#29

Post by JamesBaxter » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 6:32 AM UTC

zubspace wrote: post #21

I am really looking forward to Godot 4. GDScript improved a lot. I'm mostly excited about callables (function pointers), easier signal handling in combination with await (former yields) and an improved tweening system. The scripting environment inside of the editor with inbuilt documentation, code completion and debugger is really an achievement. The only thing I miss are static typing and refactoring tools. You can…

Trying to get my Godot project to a stable enough place that I can try early dotnet6 builds.

It’s been quite fun abstracting as much game logic as possible into testable class libraries so I’m hoping it won’t be a bad migration for me.

Really looking forward to seeing if dependency injection will be easier

Re: Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting

#30

Post by general_pizza » Wed, Aug 24, 2022, 6:37 AM UTC

jay_kyburz wrote: post #25

snarfy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epic is working on verse script now. Even they realized visual scripting is not the best way to do development. It's very limiting. I was much happier with UE when it had unrealscript. I still do game development on the old engines, but I don't like doing anything with the new engines that force you into c++ or blueprints. Code is simply more expressive than flow charts.

Where did you read about verse? Last I heard about it was Carlos talking about it in a video a few years ago. I haven't heard anything since.

It’s not text but there’s a podcast with Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell person) talking about his new job at Epic working on verse. Starts around 50s in:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-haskell-interlude/...