this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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It's code, but without automated tests, comments, style rules, and often stored in binary files making change management a nightmare.
It's trying to paint but you can only use your fingers and also one of the other devs ate all the red.
Sure, but for kids, or someone new to development, it also lays out things visually for them. A seasoned software engineer writes a for loop with muscle memory, but when you’re trying to learn the underlying basics of what code does, stuff like this can be super helpful. While it’s obviously not designed for professional work, it’s great to let these tools flourish, for many they can be the stepping stone into going into a career of actually writing code.
Then, as a professional, they too can lament writing tests, commenting their code, linting it properly before they merge it, dealing with actual merge conflicts, dealing with others’ bad code, dealing with their own bad code, the cycle continues
I wish I could show this comment to people who built a multi million dollar project for the government using just these kinds of tools. But maybe you can only get away with that kind of thing in government contracting work lol
The node graph (shown on the left side of the image) is like one of the cornerstones of unreal engine though isn't it? Meant for professional work? I think it's stupid and could never use it.
It is made for professional work, but as far as I know, it's mostly used to allow a bridge between that artists and the programmers.
What makes it interesting is that a programmer can code some functionnality to an object in C++ and then create a subclass in a blueprint (that visual bullshit). Then, a 3D artist can plug his model and animations simply with the visual code without any knowledge about programming.
If you use that to code the functionnality, it will be messy most of the time. I was really surprised to see how big of a graph you need to manage just to do a for loop with a condition and a couple variables, just to replicate 4 small lines of code. But sometimes, all you want is to call a function from the engine and it's actually faster to open a blueprint and call it there than to create a C++ class and recompile everything.
I guess that's cool to make it easier for the artists, but at the same time, because most artists have no idea how code convention works, you'd better be able to program a very rigid interface for the artists to use, so they can't fuck anything up
So it's game code.
But seriously, Unreal blueprints actually support all of those.
That's what I said when I joined a place that wrote almost everything in blueprints. Somehow all the other devs didn't think it was possible.
Binary assets though.... and performance.... and debugging when things start to misbehave in native code called from blueprint.... 😵💫