Type system of Fortnite's Verse language • Hacker News Board

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#71

Post by winrid » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 3:25 AM UTC

foolfoolz wrote: post #49

winrid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it doesn't really look like the kind of thing I'd design for 12-year-olds to use? Lua would probably work just as well and been a better choice...

this comment is wrong on multiple levels - this reduces fortnite’s audience to 12 year olds. the average age of a fortnite player is an adult - fortnite custom mods / modes are nearly all developed by adults (the people who will write in this language) - verse is designed to be used more widely than just fortnite in other games by other game develoment professionals (that are nearly all adults) i don’t understand how…

this comment is wrong on multiple levels :)

1. What does revenue have to do with target audience age? Roblox makes billions, right?

2. The only people I know that play fortnite are younger than 15.

3. "fortnite custom mods / modes are nearly all developed by adults" -> because the language is too difficult for new programmers?

4. "verse is designed to be used more widely than just fortnite" -> so is Lua and Python.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#72

Post by nylonstrung » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 3:32 AM UTC

Falkon1313 wrote: post #70

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not necessarily saying you are wrong here in the case of fortnite, but do you have data to back up that the average fortnite player is an adult? It seems like in general it tends to be wildly more popular with younger people, generally kids and teens - although i don't have data for this either, just based off what I've personally seen.

I have no data but anecdotes. I'm in my 40s and whenever I played squads, trios, or duos, I was playing with people in their 20s or 30s. Also, it's one of those rare online games where you can queue in at 3am or in the middle of a school day and almost instantly get into a game, and it's a game requiring 100 people per match. Other online games I've gotten into, 15 player games, essentially died out late at night or…

The composition of your matches will vary wildly based on ranking and geography so it's hard to say based on experience in-game

Epic doesn't release specific numbers but they say in the T&C for creative that the content should appeal to 15-25 year olds I believe

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#73

Post by ClimaxGravely » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 3:38 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #59

Has anyone tried Verse in the Fortnite context yet? I haven't used it yet, but I've been reading the documents. Understand, this is a language for object behaviors. You don't write "a game" in Verse. You write behaviors for each type of object, and they interact to produce behavior. So it's a large number of little programs, reacting to events and talking to each other. The main kinds of programs seem to be "devices"…

I have. At first it seemed a little restrictive because you can only really access other devices but I took a look at some of the example projects and it's relatively powerful for all its restrictions.

There's a king of the hill game mode they used as a demo with a UI for class selection and all that. At first I thought that was impossible to do with the provided tools but Verse exposes a lightweight UI system you can use. So it's totally possible.

Playing with UEFN is definitely quite restricted but it reminds me of my quake/halflife modding days. I find I really excel in a restricted game development environment.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#74

Post by eat_veggies » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 4:23 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #66

jeron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to this. If anything, you have a language that looks like it was made by luminaries, for luminaries. If you want something that would get kids that wanted to get into programming to create custom Fortnite modes, you want something that looks closer to Scratch or Python. I want to say Roblox has made programming quite accessible to children iirc

> If anything, you have a language that looks like it was made by luminaries, for luminaries. Well, the opposite of that approach gives you Go.

Opposite in the sense that golang was created by luminaries for new grads

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#75

Post by lynx23 » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 4:45 AM UTC

I was surprised to see where Simon moved to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=832JF1o7Ck8

The talk sounded a bit unsubstantial, there being a lot of things he was not supposed to say yet. But still interesting.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#76

Post by ralusek » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 4:46 AM UTC

I made this comment elsewhere, but does anybody else find it funny that Epic is releasing an editor for Fortnite, when Unreal Engine started off as an editor for Unreal Tournament? I'm predicting that at some point, Epic will make such a popular game in the new Fortnite editor, that they'll release an editor for that game.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#77

Post by dsffghfghfghfgh » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 4:51 AM UTC

542458 wrote: post #5

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #2

Tangential, and because I had to look it up: > Verse has been designed by some people who really know what they’re doing: Lennart Augustsson, Joachim Breitner, Koen Claessen, Ranjit Jhala, Simon Peyton Jones, Olin Shivers, Tim Sweeney The listed people are all luminaries of the functional programming world (and adjacent, like theorem proving and software verification), particularly Haskell. Hell, Simon Peyton Jones i…

At the same time… the language is interesting , and I’m sure it’s technically very well designed, but I’m not sure it’s a good fit for the task they’ve got. The apparent goal is for this to allow anybody to democratically contribute to Fortnite (a game most popular with a fairly young audience), but the language feels very technical and not-beginner-friendly to me. For example, it’s fairly symbol-heavy (making it int…

The typical perspective with functional programming, if you buy it, is that it is a little more investment in getting going, but once you have something compiling and working you spend less time on bugs and refactoring.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#78

Post by paulddraper » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 5:04 AM UTC

ClimaxGravely wrote: post #51

illiarian wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they might be just creating a Yet Another Language precisely because they are luminaries of functional programming. Those often tend to chase a yet another unattainable dream of "the one true functional language". When you type the words "the really know what they are doing" when talking about a language for game programming , I would expect people who know about game programming first, and about language design s…

C/C++/C# are indeed often used for game programming but when it comes to gameplay logic scripting there's a lot more options. Lua, blueprint, lisp, angelscript, unity's graph language etc..

Yeah, Lua is super common.

Not exactly sure why, but it really is.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#79

Post by shagie » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 5:22 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #27

shagie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that classic programming language of old - LOGO. It's a really neat LISP. Yes, a LISP. to factorial :number if :number = 1 [output 1] output :number * factorial :number - 1 end or... to reverse :stuff ifelse equal? count :stuff 1 [output first :stuff] [output sentence reverse butfirst :stuff first :stuff] end From https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/logo_p... And from https://dl.acm.org/doi…

Sounds more like TCL than LISP. (Of course there are those who consider TCL part of the LISP family). > So... the weird characters? We dealt with them as kids, that's no weirder than LOGO. Most kids didn't learn much from LOGO. AIUI the best available research on learning programming (which is very limited) says that weird characters are a barrier to understanding, and so is case sensitivity.

LOGO was written decades before TCL and even half a decade before Smalltalk (which Wikipedia lists as one of the languages that LOGO influenced).

> The first four years of Logo research, development and teaching work was done at BBN. The first implementation of Logo, called Ghost, was written in LISP on a PDP-1. The goal was to create a mathematical land where children could play with words and sentences. Modeled on LISP, the design goals of Logo included accessible power and informative error messages.

> Logo was a primary influence on the Smalltalk programming language. It is also the main influence on the Etoys educational programming environment and language, which is essentially a Logo variant written in Squeak (itself a variant of Smalltalk)

http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ for more on how LOGO influenced Smalltalk design.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#80

Post by Yoric » Thu, Mar 30, 2023, 5:27 AM UTC

nightski wrote: post #34

542458 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time… the language is interesting , and I’m sure it’s technically very well designed, but I’m not sure it’s a good fit for the task they’ve got. The apparent goal is for this to allow anybody to democratically contribute to Fortnite (a game most popular with a fairly young audience), but the language feels very technical and not-beginner-friendly to me. For example, it’s fairly symbol-heavy (making it int…

I mean I was writing C++ in junior high and I am by no means that bright. Just persistent. I think in some ways we have become too afraid of some upfront complexity at the expense of beginners in order for more well engineered systems. I think a slightly higher learning curve is not always a bad thing.

That's a good remark.

In general, lowering the entry barrier is good. But you are right that we may now be scared of anything that doesn't have a very low entry barrier.