5 ms·

Blueprints Blueprints Blueprints The name of the game is iteration speed. (I always think of Paul Grahams story about beating out the competition using Lisp.)

by mentos 3y ago

Blueprints Blueprints Blueprints The name of the game is iteration speed. (I always think of Paul Grahams story about beating out the competition using Lisp.) I've been working with UE since 2014, originally started in UE4 C++ and avoided blueprints and kept everything in C++. Was great 'for performance' and code diffs but now 10 years later I'm 99% blueprint and only go down to C++ if the performance requires it for the 1% of hot paths. My iteration time in UE using blueprints makes me shutter to think of all the time I spent waiting for C++ to compile.

bojo 3y ago
Blueprints are fun to work with, but the amount of time it takes to drag and drop nodes around to make the equivalent of a for loop feels incredibly unproductive. The result does look visually pleasing though!
- throwaway4577 3y ago
  Visually pleasing indeed. https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
_gabe_ 3y ago
I just started using Unreal 5 to prototype a VR game (lots of quirks but this engine is amazing). I’ve been writing C++ for 5ish years now and am pretty comfortable with it. I’ve also been slowly converting all the blueprints in the VR template provided by Unreal to C++ for a few reasons and was curious if these effect you. I tried using blueprints for awhile, but it just feels so cumbersome and time consuming. I can bang out 10 lines of code basically as fast as I can think, but converting those same 10 lines of code to blueprints often involves much more time. You have to click around a bunch, rearrange the routing wires, make it look readable, abstract a lot of stuff into functions that usually don’t need it just because it helps condense the blueprints. Then the blueprints end up sprawling a large area and are very difficult to keep in my head at once (whereas it would normally take less than a page of C++ code to write it out and you can easily hold that in your head). Basically, I was wondering if these downsides to blueprints effect you much or if you’ve developed suitable workarounds? I want to like blueprints, but the time it takes to click around and make it readable is painful, in my opinion, more painful than compile times for the C++.
- mentos 3y ago
  Yea its unfair to taught Blueprints as the answer when they have a serious learning curve. It took me a while to build up enough experience where I could become more expressive with Blueprints than C++. The Lyra example has some good Blueprint hygiene worth reviewing where they organize all variables underneath a function call.. but until you have serious experience with Blueprints they are going to feel like a cumbersome mess. My advice is to do what you feel most expressive with, doing the thing you enjoy more will lead to more hours of experience. Start with C++ and build up a good understanding/mental model of the engine and then eventually give Blueprints a try in a few more years and you will see them in a new light.
  - _gabe_ 3y ago
    I’ll have to check out the Lyra example! But yea, C++ definitely feels more comfortable for me at the moment. I’ll try blueprints again in a few years :)
- HellDunkel 3y ago
  Blueprints allow you to tinker with the architecture a couple of times before locking in and moving. In C++ you are much less inclined to do so.
sha90 3y ago
How big is your team? How do you code review? How do you unit test? How are you maintaining 3 year old blueprints? This will work just fine for small indie games and teams where the code is thrown out after a year, but there's no scaling this. I've worked with enough 10 year old Max/MSP patches to know that you will have an unmaintainable mess of wires that is as good as garbage after a while. Larger teams typically use Blueprints to prototype but then rewrite in C++. This is a perfectly fine use case, but ultimately you still need it "written down" for the maintainability. tl;dr Blueprints are a tool in the process to writing C++, they aren't a replacement.
hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
I really hate BP and wish we get something better. The thing is, technically you are supposed to do gameplay in BP and push the core ones to C++, but BP is so messy after a short while.

by mentos 3y ago

bojo 3y ago

Blueprints are fun to work with, but the amount of time it takes to drag and drop nodes around to make the equivalent of a for loop feels incredibly unproductive. The result does look visually pleasing though!

throwaway4577 3y ago
Visually pleasing indeed. https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/

_gabe_ 3y ago

I just started using Unreal 5 to prototype a VR game (lots of quirks but this engine is amazing). I’ve been writing C++ for 5ish years now and am pretty comfortable with it. I’ve also been slowly converting all the blueprints in the VR template provided by Unreal to C++ for a few reasons and was curious if these effect you. I tried using blueprints for awhile, but it just feels so cumbersome and time consuming. I can bang out 10 lines of code basically as fast as I can think, but converting those same 10 lines of code to blueprints often involves much more time. You have to click around a bunch, rearrange the routing wires, make it look readable, abstract a lot of stuff into functions that usually don’t need it just because it helps condense the blueprints. Then the blueprints end up sprawling a large area and are very difficult to keep in my head at once (whereas it would normally take less than a page of C++ code to write it out and you can easily hold that in your head). Basically, I was wondering if these downsides to blueprints effect you much or if you’ve developed suitable workarounds? I want to like blueprints, but the time it takes to click around and make it readable is painful, in my opinion, more painful than compile times for the C++.

mentos 3y ago
Yea its unfair to taught Blueprints as the answer when they have a serious learning curve. It took me a while to build up enough experience where I could become more expressive with Blueprints than C++. The Lyra example has some good Blueprint hygiene worth reviewing where they organize all variables underneath a function call.. but until you have serious experience with Blueprints they are going to feel like a cumbersome mess. My advice is to do what you feel most expressive with, doing the thing you enjoy more will lead to more hours of experience. Start with C++ and build up a good understanding/mental model of the engine and then eventually give Blueprints a try in a few more years and you will see them in a new light.
- _gabe_ 3y ago
  I’ll have to check out the Lyra example! But yea, C++ definitely feels more comfortable for me at the moment. I’ll try blueprints again in a few years :)
HellDunkel 3y ago
Blueprints allow you to tinker with the architecture a couple of times before locking in and moving. In C++ you are much less inclined to do so.

sha90 3y ago

How big is your team? How do you code review? How do you unit test? How are you maintaining 3 year old blueprints? This will work just fine for small indie games and teams where the code is thrown out after a year, but there's no scaling this. I've worked with enough 10 year old Max/MSP patches to know that you will have an unmaintainable mess of wires that is as good as garbage after a while. Larger teams typically use Blueprints to prototype but then rewrite in C++. This is a perfectly fine use case, but ultimately you still need it "written down" for the maintainability. tl;dr Blueprints are a tool in the process to writing C++, they aren't a replacement.

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

I really hate BP and wish we get something better. The thing is, technically you are supposed to do gameplay in BP and push the core ones to C++, but BP is so messy after a short while.