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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?

#121

Post by mejutoco »

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.

> I think you are only a huge fan of blueprints because they is no alternatives in Unreal.

The original claim was there are no alternative to blueprints, not scripting languages.

And, of course, c++ is an alternative. Maybe not the best, but an alternative to blueprints. In the Unreal documentation [1] we can find:

- Blueprints only

- C++ and Blueprints

- C++ Only

This is why I think it is common to mix and match them.

[1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/ProgrammingAndScrip...

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

#122

Post by weird-eye-issue »

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #82
xsmasher wrote: post #20

Beacuse you can expose functionality to non-programmers and let them go HAM with the components you have created. I'm constantly amazed at what artists and animators and producers can do themselves if given half the chance. Plenty of people have the "engineering Tao" but not the training for traditional programming. Removing the engineer from the content loops lets a lot of work happen really quickly.

What type of games are we talking about here though? Removing the engineers from the loop potentially allows for a lot of rapid prototyping, but probably not a lot of shipping at perf on cross-gen console and PC architecture.

Every AAA is built like this

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

#123

Post by whizzter »

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #82
xsmasher wrote: post #20

Beacuse you can expose functionality to non-programmers and let them go HAM with the components you have created. I'm constantly amazed at what artists and animators and producers can do themselves if given half the chance. Plenty of people have the "engineering Tao" but not the training for traditional programming. Removing the engineer from the content loops lets a lot of work happen really quickly.

What type of games are we talking about here though? Removing the engineers from the loop potentially allows for a lot of rapid prototyping, but probably not a lot of shipping at perf on cross-gen console and PC architecture.

What's built in these things are quite often of 2 kinds:

1: Highlevel entity logic, something implemented by a number of game characters but nothing that really steals too much performance (and at that point could be rewritten).

2: Shader stuff that is often quite plain formula calculations that doesn't introduce extra iterations and most of that perf cost is just eaten up by the GPU's.

But most importantly, the initial iteration isn't always the same as the final product. If something really becomes a bottleneck a developer can often rewrite the stuff in a more performant way (and often still leave parameters available for tweaking).

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

#124

Post by smcl »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #64
vvanders wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to have UnrealScript and 9/10 our designers still reached for Kismet instead. Lua is great and I'm a huge proponent of it but different tools are meant for different use cases.

UnrealScript had problems, that why they dropped it 10 years ago.

It's funny, I am having a blast fiddling around with UT99 and UnrealScript (thanks in no small part to the source code that you can find if you look around on github), but at my very basic level the only real issue I've encountered is the lack of good editor support.

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

#125

Post by dangerface »

Visual programming is generally considered easier to learn and there are lots of people who can't code who want to make games.

I don't really know why people consider visual programming easier than code once you know how to code I find visual programming very difficult to use or maintain a project of any moderate complexity. Theres no standardisation to visual programming either if you spend time learning one system for games and now want to make a website you now need to learn a whole new system and way of thinking about logic. If you spent all that time learning python then you would know python and could just do whatever you wanted.

I think its popularity comes mostly from fear of code, colourful icons look more approachable and easier to understand than a scary wall of text. I don't think it is easier to learn but I 100% recognise any time I have taught some one to code the number one hurdle is getting them over their fear of trying something new visual programming seems to do that well.

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

#126

Post by MisterTea »

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…

Same with industrial control ladder logic. It literally is a language based on old ladder electrical control diagrams which were popular for industrial machinery. They were easy to follow as the logic sequence went from top to bottom. The rungs are a circuit and the vertical bars are the hot and return lines of the control power supply.

  |----||----||----()
       X1    X3    Y1
The above program is a series of two "contacts" (like a switch), the "-||-" symbol, and the output "coil" which is meant to symbolize a relay coil. Simple bit logic: if X1 and X3 are true, Y1 is set true. There are many more symbols like comparisons symbols such as -|Fun fact I learned: Many (all?) rail signal and control blocks are written in ladder with ALL valid states of that rail block predefined in ladder. The logic is simple but the task is incredibly critical. Supposedly it is much easier to visually verify/test the program using ladder vs a written language.

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

#127

Post by throwmeariver1 »

It's mainly because of the history of VFX tools and pipelines. A lot of game studios adopted tools from ILM and Pixar. One of the first notable presentation on compositing must be from the 1984 SIGGRAPH held by Porter and Duff. They both went and implemented a node based workflow through the whole pipeline at ILM and later at Pixar. Visual Programming also is a lower barrier of entry, at VFX and Game Studios artist need to proficient in the underlying architecture to get optimal performance and visual fidelity it's easier to give them tools like node base shaders or blueprints instead of code. Most visual programming is also realtime which makes it a lot easier to understand for non programmers.

https://keithp.com/~keithp/porterduff/p253-porter.pdf

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

#129

Post by girvo »

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…

GameMaker (version 4… in 2001, man I’m getting old) had a similar system. It’s also what got me into programming, as I could also attach my own scripts to event triggers (and sets of event triggers, in a linear visual GUI logic way), and so I learned GML as my first programming language.

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

#130

Post by Tozen »

> Why is visual programming so popular for game programming compared to other domains...

Is visual programming really so popular in game programming, or is it being simply used for specific and particular tasks?

From what I see, nobody is using blueprint to outright program any games because it is too slow, hard to debug, and way too easy to get lost in visual spaghetti.

In context to visual effects, visual "scripting" does comes more into play, because you are doing something like video editing. In that context, you are already dealing with a list of visually identifiable options to achieve an outcome, so visual scripting is the next level up by controlling how the options are applied.

Everything is already setup for the person, it's a matter of what choices and to what degree. If you reduced this to a more primitive concept, we would be talking about which buttons to press and in what sequence. Yes, we often still define this type of interaction as programming, but there should be no illusions that this is more basic and limited. It has its place (visual programming), and clearly more so with artists (who are not programmers by trade), but you still have to do text based programming for the more advanced and creative stuff. Visual programming isn't taking over traditional text based programming, rather it's supplemental.

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