this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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I kind of understand the appeal of blueprints, for small projects and quick proof of concept maybe. But never understood how can anyone do any serious or complex work with it. It just felt so limitting when I tried it in Unreal, never bothered with plugins for unity.
I mean, I think a lot of times it is drilled in to people as “best practice” for working in a larger organization.
To some extent this makes sense from a managerial perspective, like, you can move people between projects and expect them to pick up where the last person took off since it will be somewhat intelligible.
I’ve seen some nightmares though where projects were barely function because a bunch of unnecessary stuff was added to make it fit the shape.
Blueprints are faster to develop with in Unreal Engine, as it's quite literally built into Unreal Engine and doesn't require compiling from a separate program. It's even got live node previews to show you exactly what is being run at specific times, so it's easier to debug in too.
It really shines when you want to prototype a lot of things really fast, especially to get the game working first before the optimization step of moving functions and backend stuff over to C++.
I have some experience with the visual coding that Godot has/had (they're deprecating it) and it looked like a useful tool for, say you've got an artist on the team who does all the creature models, the visual code stuff would be good for them to program the behavior of some little background creature in. Like I could see doing the AI for a chicken in it. Wander a random distance between 1 and 5 meters, peck(), play cluck.wav, scratch(). That way the programming that's really the artist's job can get done, but the REAL coding work like game logic can be done by the programmers on the team.
Again, this feature has been deprecated.