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Comment by moritonal | Hacker News Reader

See that's what I want to talk about.

We're moving towards a world where ML can generate code that compiles from a single comment.

We have games like Battlefield now providing no-code options to FPS gamers.

There are literal super computers that can spin-up environments in seconds, run a test suite and report back, all to give a little tick on a PR.

Yet the IDE still just gives a messy error message if you forget a semi-colon or quote in the wrong place.

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> We have games like Battlefield now providing no-code options to FPS gamers.

Can you elaborate on that or drop some keywords that will help with a web search?

Check out Blueprint in Unreal Engine

Not a massive fan of Blueprints, as a game developer who is also a long time software developer/security engineer. I think for non-coders it's a great system and can be helpful to view data flow/execution paths in a visual way. I wish the C++ and blueprints systems where better integrated. For example being able to generate one from the other or directly import and use each other (you can sorta do that but with limited access and some boiler plate). I'm not disparaging it, it is really a great attempt at visual coding but as a developer it's not a setup I'd choose to use pretty much ever. For me the best use would be for a non-coder game designer to use it to script levels and for me to integrate seemlessly from C++ as a dev and since I'm a single person indie dev it's of less use to me. It doesn't seem quite ready for that. Most games and examples I've seen with it are either blueprints or C++ not a lot of mixing yet that I've seen, though there is certainly some.

To be clear on my opinion you can integrate blueprints and CPP code but it's not as seemless as I'd like. Given that blueprints run in a VM and your CPP code doesn't there are certainly blocks. They are working on fixing that (https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/ProgrammingAndScrip...) for example. I'm impressed with the quality of blueprints but would still rather approach software from a text based approach and a low level approach. I also hate working in JS frameworks and big collections of libraries all bundled together.

Battlefield 2042 has a portal mode (their name for it) that allows gamers to "design" a mixup of a variety of older and current battlefield game assets, maps, and modes to create a new game experience with other gamers. For a similar concept in platformers look at Super Mario Maker 1/2 which are AMAZINGLY good games and software for designing mario levels. Here is a link to the Battlefield 2042 documentation: https://help.ea.com/en/help/battlefield/battlefield-2042/bat...

I've been thinking about/prototyping some programming interfaces in this direction. I'd be interested in getting your thoughts on this! https://feifan.blog/posts/tanagram-creating-a-database-based...

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