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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

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.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
UnrealScript had problems, that why they dropped it 10 years ago.
- vvanders 5y ago
  Sure but as far as scripting languages go it was enough to get the job done at the time. I don't think swapping to Lua would fundamentally change that. I say that as someone who's worked on both sides and shipped production Lua, Unreal script and C++ during that era. Visual scripting/programming tools are for your designers/artists/animators or as glue code between content that is under high iteration cycles. You can do things such as "find all references to this actor" or realtime visualization of states that just aren't as streamlined as text based languages. The tradeoff is there's a level of complexity where text based languages are better at expressing abstractions and structure, you use them in different contexts and for different parts of a project.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    I'm also in the industry as an artist, level designer and gameplay programmer and have shipped games in Unreal 2, 3 and 4 and Unity, and you'll never convince me that creating boxes and wiring them up will ever be as good as text at expressing game logic and game rules. I can understand why you might want to use it for shaders. (but not really) And when it comes to placing volumes and marking up the scene I'll absolutely want visual gizmos. I genuinely believe that if Epic had taken all the effort they put into blueprints, and put it into a text based programming environment, game designers would be more productive.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      And is kind of what they’re doing now with their Verse language.
      - jay_kyburz 5y ago
        Yep, I'm looking forward to it. Have they publicly talked more about it since 2020? update: just watched Tim Tillosons twitch stream about it. I had not seen that before.
        namrog84 4y ago
        There is confirmation its coming this year(2022). They previously stated they wanted to release beta late 2021 but got delayed. I think it'll be a massive game changer for unreal and am super excited for it.
    - vvanders 5y ago
      > ... and you'll never convince me that creating boxes and wiring them up will ever be as good as text at expressing game logic and game rules. Sure, that's pretty clear :). If you want to re-read my post above I wasn't saying that would be as good at game rules and there's a very real limitation as soon as you get away from scripted encounters and into anything more complex. At the same time consider there may be people, teams and designers who it does work for. Very few things are in absolute and there are places where I've seen tools like this used effectively.
      - jay_kyburz 5y ago
        Sure.. I'm with ya. The only reason I commented at all was because the OP listed a bunch of stuff that was good in blueprints, but I believe all those things are good in text too.
- smcl 5y 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.

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.

jay_kyburz 5y ago

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

vvanders 5y ago
Sure but as far as scripting languages go it was enough to get the job done at the time. I don't think swapping to Lua would fundamentally change that. I say that as someone who's worked on both sides and shipped production Lua, Unreal script and C++ during that era. Visual scripting/programming tools are for your designers/artists/animators or as glue code between content that is under high iteration cycles. You can do things such as "find all references to this actor" or realtime visualization of states that just aren't as streamlined as text based languages. The tradeoff is there's a level of complexity where text based languages are better at expressing abstractions and structure, you use them in different contexts and for different parts of a project.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I'm also in the industry as an artist, level designer and gameplay programmer and have shipped games in Unreal 2, 3 and 4 and Unity, and you'll never convince me that creating boxes and wiring them up will ever be as good as text at expressing game logic and game rules. I can understand why you might want to use it for shaders. (but not really) And when it comes to placing volumes and marking up the scene I'll absolutely want visual gizmos. I genuinely believe that if Epic had taken all the effort they put into blueprints, and put it into a text based programming environment, game designers would be more productive.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    And is kind of what they’re doing now with their Verse language.
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      Yep, I'm looking forward to it. Have they publicly talked more about it since 2020? update: just watched Tim Tillosons twitch stream about it. I had not seen that before.
      - namrog84 4y ago
        There is confirmation its coming this year(2022). They previously stated they wanted to release beta late 2021 but got delayed. I think it'll be a massive game changer for unreal and am super excited for it.
  - vvanders 5y ago
    > ... and you'll never convince me that creating boxes and wiring them up will ever be as good as text at expressing game logic and game rules. Sure, that's pretty clear :). If you want to re-read my post above I wasn't saying that would be as good at game rules and there's a very real limitation as soon as you get away from scripted encounters and into anything more complex. At the same time consider there may be people, teams and designers who it does work for. Very few things are in absolute and there are places where I've seen tools like this used effectively.
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      Sure.. I'm with ya. The only reason I commented at all was because the OP listed a bunch of stuff that was good in blueprints, but I believe all those things are good in text too.
smcl 5y 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.