@djlink If there's one thing I've learned about UI, it's that there's a sort of induced demand phenomenon for quality of life features. The more accessible something gets, the less skilled people try to use it (good for them!), and the more mess they make.
In Unity, which now has its own visual scripting tool but used not to, there was the notorious GetComponent() function, which streamlines initialization... so a lot of people used it every frame (and killed performance).
I used to make mods for a game in unreal engine 3. unreal engine 3's equivalent of blueprints was called kismet, but everyone called it kismetti. i've always avoided it, i much prefer just using vim (kind of the exact opposite)
@djlink goood lord, UE needs to take note from the Blender users in the office. The nesting/grouping of nodes in Blender is really nice and I wonder if it could help organize this better?
@haifisch@djlink Unreal offers all the tools needed to create nice and tidy blueprints. You can create functions, organize functions into several classes/blueprints and have a lot of options to align or collapse graphs, create comments, etc.
These blueprints from hell are just created by incompetent people and if given the chance, they would create the same mess in C++ or whatever tool they're given
@djlink Well, I don't know about blueprints, but this is exactly what comes to my mind when someone peddles the idea of visual/node programming as "it will make things easier for non-programmers".
@djlink well the joke is that Maya, internally, keeps connections between its nodes, and in theory it could be really powerful. But it's not. You quickly reach the point where it becomes a mess for anything other than driving some simple things like animations. And then Houdini came along...
@djlink Complexity is a fact of large software systems that do a lot of things - which is what customers demand. While C++ has many warts, you cannot make a significant difference is the blueprint problem with a different language as the language isn't the source of the problem, it is the complexity of the features that is the source.
@djlink oh wow, I recognize that. The graph on the left is our microservice API dependency map and the graph on the right is the wiring diagram for one of our distribution switch racks.
Honestly it's easier to keep the former in your head and map the latter by wiggling the cable you're interested in.
Add comment