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Cool to see the dev tools! But that made me wonder... will ever have "visual coding/scripting" outside of video game development? Sometimes I wonder that we ar

Cool to see the dev tools! But that made me wonder... will ever have "visual coding/scripting" outside of video game development? Sometimes I wonder that we are still in the "silent cinema age" of computer programming. Sure we have new and modern tools but in the end of the day it's still writing plain text.

meibo 4y ago
Even in game development, it often turns out to be a huge mess that coders have to go and sort out after the fact, it's almost inevitable if it's general purpose enough. If you do decide to build a scripting system for designers, I would recommend being very conservative with features and thinking twice before adding any new feature.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Just hire competent and trustworthy designers, instead of purposefully crippling the tools you spend so much time developing. The best designers can also code, and if you design a system that discourages instead of encourages designers from coding, you're wasting the potential of those precious coder/designers, and wasting the opportunity to train your best designers to code too. It's not as if Rock Star can't find anybody qualified who wants to work for them, or any designers who are willing to learn to code in a powerful visual scripting language. This attitude causes disasters like PHP's "Smarty" templating language. PHP was already a templating language, but somebody got it in their head that there should be an iron-clad separation between designers and programmers, and that PHP gave designers too much power and confused them, and that their incompetent untrustworthy designers who refused to learn anything about programming deserved something even "simpler" than PHP, so they came up with Smarty. Then over time the realized that their designers were powerless, so their programmers would have to learn TWO languages so they could wade into the Smarty templates to make them actually work with all the extra code they had to write because Smarty was so crippled, so they nickle-and-dimed more and more incoherent programming language elements into Smarty, making it EVEN HARDER to use and more complicated and less consistent than PHP, yet nowhere near as powerful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736574 DonHopkins on Aug 19, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: YAML: Probably not so great after all One of the most ridiculous examples of this was the Smarty templating language for PHP. Somebody got the silly idea in their head of implementing a templating language in PHP, even though PHP is ALREADY a templating language. So they took out all the useful features of PHP, then stuck a few of them back in with even goofier inconsistent hard-to-learn syntax, in a way that required a code generation step, and made templates absolutely impossible to debug. So in the end your template programmers need to know something just as difficult as PHP itself, yet even more esoteric and less well documented, and it doesn't even end up saving PHP programmers any time, either. https://web.archive.org/web/20100226023855/http://lutt.se/blog/2006/08/13/why-template-engines-like-smarty-sucks-in-php.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100226023855/http://lutt.se/bl... >Bad things you accomplish when using Smarty: >Adding a second language to program in, and increasing the complexity. And the language is not well spread at all, allthough it is’nt hard to learn. >Not really making the code more readable for the designer. >You include a lot of code which, in my eyes, is just overkill (more code to parse means slower sites). https://web.archive.org/web/20090227001433/http://www.ranting-wolf.info/2008/03/21/php-truth-about-short-open-tags-and-smarty/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090227001433/http://www.rantin... >Most people would argue, that Smarty is a good solution for templating. I really can’t see any valid reasons, that that is so. Specially since “Templating” and “Language” should never be in the same statement. Let alone one word after another. People are telling me, that Smarty is “better for designers, since they don’t need to learn PHP!”. Wait. What? You’re not learning one programming language, but you’re learning some other? What’s the point in that, anyway? Do us all a favour, and just think the next time you issue that statement, okay? http://www.ianbicking.org/php-ghetto.html http://www.ianbicking.org/php-ghetto.html >I think the Broken Windows theory applies here. PHP is such a load of crap, right down to the standard library, that it creates a culture where it's acceptable to write horrible code. The bugs and security holes are so common, it doesn't seem so important to keep everything in order and audited. Fixes get applied wholesale, with monstrosities like magic quotes. It's like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing policy -- sure some apps get messed up, but maybe you catch a few attacks in the process. It's what happened when the language designers gave up. Maybe with PHP 5 they are trying to clean up the neighborhood, but that doesn't change the fact when you program in PHP you are programming in a dump.
  - prescriptivist 4y ago
    Someone doesn’t like Smarty…
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  > Even in game development, it often turns out to be a huge mess Mandatory link: https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
  - shakezula 4y ago
    Don’t know what I’m looking at but i love the idea of graphing software systems to explain to a layman the pure hell some of them can become.
    - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
      > Don’t know what I’m looking at Unreal Engine 4 includes a visual scripting language called Blueprint. That website collects some of the bad examples of what people do with this system - a lot of the times, the results are the visual equivalent of spaghetti code. In my experience, this kind of spaghetti is quite normal in shipped games.
      - shakezula 4y ago
        Thanks for the explanation! I didn’t know that. It’s a great site, thanks for posting the link.
      - capableweb 4y ago
        > In my experience, this kind of spaghetti is quite normal in shipped games Just to be clear, any type of spaghetti (visual or code) is common in any type of shipped software product (game or not), especially ones where there is deadlines.
naillo 4y ago
As someone not in the gaming industry, what does 'visual coding/scripting' mean? Any links or wikipedia articles that describe it? (Or an explanation yourself?) I'm curiuos if it could work well with new developments in AI generated images (stable diffusion etc).
- unpopularopp 4y ago
  Unreal Blueprints for example https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-scripting-in-unreal-engine/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-sc... That's the leading visual scripting system This a guy has very good tutorials in video form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY6Nl-OEhSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY6Nl-OEhSo
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Houdini is also a leading example, but for the 3D/VFX/movie industry, where nodes/networks are basically visual scripting to do basically everything in the product. https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/ https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  > I'm curiuos if it could work well with new developments in AI generated images (stable diffusion etc). Visual coding is still highly symbolic and structured, typically a directed graph representing data flow. The "visual" part is just a middleman so to speak. I don't have a lot of experience with AI-generated images, but from what I've seen it doesn't look like its strength is generating highly structured/logical images.
discordance 4y ago
I’ve worked a few mechatronics type gigs and Labview was standard there. One of the few places I have seen or used visual coding.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  You never saw Simulink? It's super entrenched in automotive and aerospace. It's also very nice to visualize models of components of cars/planes in Simulink using visual computing and play around with various blocks and learn how they affect the stability of the system.
  - discordance 4y ago
    Matlab was standard for us in university but not used anywhere in the industry/companies I worked.
Dinux 4y ago
They seem to be using a lot of Microsoft/Visual Studio tools and some internal testing application.
- wombarly 4y ago
  Basically all AAA games are build using Visual Studio in some way.
d_meeze 4y ago
My experience with visual scripting or coding is that it’s hard for more than one person to work on for anything other than a single screen of complexity. No git merge, so serial development. Hard to understand and tweak for anyone except the creator.
KineticLensman 4y ago
> "visual coding/scripting" outside of video game development One common application of node-graph editing is shader construction for rendering engines. For Octane, see e.g. [0] [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=octane+render+engine+node+graph+editing&t=opera&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=octane+render+engine+node+graph+ed...
ivanjermakov 4y ago
Two applications that come to mind that use visual scripting are: - Blender's Node editor[1], used to create materials and describe post-processing flow. - DaVinci Resolve Nodes[2], used to create reusable color grading profile (LUT) [1]: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/editors/node_editor/introduction.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/editors/node_editor/... [2]: https://www.makeuseof.com/nodes-davinci-resolve-beginner-tutorial https://www.makeuseof.com/nodes-davinci-resolve-beginner-tut...

meibo 4y ago

Even in game development, it often turns out to be a huge mess that coders have to go and sort out after the fact, it's almost inevitable if it's general purpose enough. If you do decide to build a scripting system for designers, I would recommend being very conservative with features and thinking twice before adding any new feature.

DonHopkins 4y ago
Just hire competent and trustworthy designers, instead of purposefully crippling the tools you spend so much time developing. The best designers can also code, and if you design a system that discourages instead of encourages designers from coding, you're wasting the potential of those precious coder/designers, and wasting the opportunity to train your best designers to code too. It's not as if Rock Star can't find anybody qualified who wants to work for them, or any designers who are willing to learn to code in a powerful visual scripting language. This attitude causes disasters like PHP's "Smarty" templating language. PHP was already a templating language, but somebody got it in their head that there should be an iron-clad separation between designers and programmers, and that PHP gave designers too much power and confused them, and that their incompetent untrustworthy designers who refused to learn anything about programming deserved something even "simpler" than PHP, so they came up with Smarty. Then over time the realized that their designers were powerless, so their programmers would have to learn TWO languages so they could wade into the Smarty templates to make them actually work with all the extra code they had to write because Smarty was so crippled, so they nickle-and-dimed more and more incoherent programming language elements into Smarty, making it EVEN HARDER to use and more complicated and less consistent than PHP, yet nowhere near as powerful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736574 DonHopkins on Aug 19, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: YAML: Probably not so great after all One of the most ridiculous examples of this was the Smarty templating language for PHP. Somebody got the silly idea in their head of implementing a templating language in PHP, even though PHP is ALREADY a templating language. So they took out all the useful features of PHP, then stuck a few of them back in with even goofier inconsistent hard-to-learn syntax, in a way that required a code generation step, and made templates absolutely impossible to debug. So in the end your template programmers need to know something just as difficult as PHP itself, yet even more esoteric and less well documented, and it doesn't even end up saving PHP programmers any time, either. https://web.archive.org/web/20100226023855/http://lutt.se/blog/2006/08/13/why-template-engines-like-smarty-sucks-in-php.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100226023855/http://lutt.se/bl... >Bad things you accomplish when using Smarty: >Adding a second language to program in, and increasing the complexity. And the language is not well spread at all, allthough it is’nt hard to learn. >Not really making the code more readable for the designer. >You include a lot of code which, in my eyes, is just overkill (more code to parse means slower sites). https://web.archive.org/web/20090227001433/http://www.ranting-wolf.info/2008/03/21/php-truth-about-short-open-tags-and-smarty/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090227001433/http://www.rantin... >Most people would argue, that Smarty is a good solution for templating. I really can’t see any valid reasons, that that is so. Specially since “Templating” and “Language” should never be in the same statement. Let alone one word after another. People are telling me, that Smarty is “better for designers, since they don’t need to learn PHP!”. Wait. What? You’re not learning one programming language, but you’re learning some other? What’s the point in that, anyway? Do us all a favour, and just think the next time you issue that statement, okay? http://www.ianbicking.org/php-ghetto.html http://www.ianbicking.org/php-ghetto.html >I think the Broken Windows theory applies here. PHP is such a load of crap, right down to the standard library, that it creates a culture where it's acceptable to write horrible code. The bugs and security holes are so common, it doesn't seem so important to keep everything in order and audited. Fixes get applied wholesale, with monstrosities like magic quotes. It's like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing policy -- sure some apps get messed up, but maybe you catch a few attacks in the process. It's what happened when the language designers gave up. Maybe with PHP 5 they are trying to clean up the neighborhood, but that doesn't change the fact when you program in PHP you are programming in a dump.
- prescriptivist 4y ago
  Someone doesn’t like Smarty…
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
> Even in game development, it often turns out to be a huge mess Mandatory link: https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
- shakezula 4y ago
  Don’t know what I’m looking at but i love the idea of graphing software systems to explain to a layman the pure hell some of them can become.
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    > Don’t know what I’m looking at Unreal Engine 4 includes a visual scripting language called Blueprint. That website collects some of the bad examples of what people do with this system - a lot of the times, the results are the visual equivalent of spaghetti code. In my experience, this kind of spaghetti is quite normal in shipped games.
    - shakezula 4y ago
      Thanks for the explanation! I didn’t know that. It’s a great site, thanks for posting the link.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      > In my experience, this kind of spaghetti is quite normal in shipped games Just to be clear, any type of spaghetti (visual or code) is common in any type of shipped software product (game or not), especially ones where there is deadlines.

naillo 4y ago

As someone not in the gaming industry, what does 'visual coding/scripting' mean? Any links or wikipedia articles that describe it? (Or an explanation yourself?) I'm curiuos if it could work well with new developments in AI generated images (stable diffusion etc).

unpopularopp 4y ago
Unreal Blueprints for example https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-scripting-in-unreal-engine/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-sc... That's the leading visual scripting system This a guy has very good tutorials in video form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY6Nl-OEhSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY6Nl-OEhSo
- capableweb 4y ago
  Houdini is also a leading example, but for the 3D/VFX/movie industry, where nodes/networks are basically visual scripting to do basically everything in the product. https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/ https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
> I'm curiuos if it could work well with new developments in AI generated images (stable diffusion etc). Visual coding is still highly symbolic and structured, typically a directed graph representing data flow. The "visual" part is just a middleman so to speak. I don't have a lot of experience with AI-generated images, but from what I've seen it doesn't look like its strength is generating highly structured/logical images.

discordance 4y ago

I’ve worked a few mechatronics type gigs and Labview was standard there. One of the few places I have seen or used visual coding.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
You never saw Simulink? It's super entrenched in automotive and aerospace. It's also very nice to visualize models of components of cars/planes in Simulink using visual computing and play around with various blocks and learn how they affect the stability of the system.
- discordance 4y ago
  Matlab was standard for us in university but not used anywhere in the industry/companies I worked.

Dinux 4y ago

They seem to be using a lot of Microsoft/Visual Studio tools and some internal testing application.

wombarly 4y ago
Basically all AAA games are build using Visual Studio in some way.

d_meeze 4y ago

My experience with visual scripting or coding is that it’s hard for more than one person to work on for anything other than a single screen of complexity. No git merge, so serial development. Hard to understand and tweak for anyone except the creator.

KineticLensman 4y ago

> "visual coding/scripting" outside of video game development One common application of node-graph editing is shader construction for rendering engines. For Octane, see e.g. [0] [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=octane+render+engine+node+graph+editing&t=opera&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=octane+render+engine+node+graph+ed...

ivanjermakov 4y ago

Two applications that come to mind that use visual scripting are: - Blender's Node editor[1], used to create materials and describe post-processing flow. - DaVinci Resolve Nodes[2], used to create reusable color grading profile (LUT) [1]: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/editors/node_editor/introduction.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/editors/node_editor/... [2]: https://www.makeuseof.com/nodes-davinci-resolve-beginner-tutorial https://www.makeuseof.com/nodes-davinci-resolve-beginner-tut...