Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbrueck | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this year we completed a huge refactor that involved, among other things, getting us almost 100% off blueprints (now we use them just for little bits of presentation logic in UIs).

BPs are amazing for discovering how to use the engine - they provide a sort of guided exploration of things, especially when you don't know what you don't know.

For us they really, really, really broke down when it came to version control, multiple people working on the same BP, code reuse, and refactoring. Arguably, at least some of this was our fault - I think you're "supposed" to do the major coding not in BP and then use BP mostly for really high level stuff, and we didn't always do that.

Anyway, it's been wonderful not having those issues anymore. Gone are the days of changing one thing and then git saying that 100 files have uncommitted changes!

View on HN

Hey, I've been working on something I think is pretty cool to address some of the shortcomings mentioned here. If you're up for chatting about your experience and offering some feedback, mind hitting my profile and shooting me an email (on my homepage)?

ua6oxa! Is this like an unreal engine blueprint alternative you are working on?

hey Chris :) I'll email you!

It's nice to hear from someone with real experience.

Blueprints clearly delivered negative ROI. In general they probably do. This is the worst time to be advocating for visual programming, considering the first truly groundbreaking application of AI is going to be in writing code.

The real question is, did C++ give you any real ROI either? Probably not, it probably only got in the way compared to the way Unity is architected.

> Gone are the days of changing one thing and then git saying that 100 files have uncommitted changes!

You're using Unreal, but not with Perforce? Get back into the time machine buddy!

People's expectations about this extremely clunky engine are way too high.

> The real question is, did C++ give you any real ROI either?

We actually moved most of everything that was in BP (and a good bit of what was in C++) to Python, so it addressed all of our issues while also speeding up development and, somewhat surprisingly, giving us a decent performance boost too.

> You're using Unreal, but not with Perforce?

Yeah, definitely not going to use Perforce, haha - might as well be using SourceSafe!

> People's expectations about this extremely clunky engine are way too high.

Unreal absolutely does have its warts, an almost overwhelming amount of complexity, and we've run into our share of issues. Sometimes you're amazed at how quickly a feature can be implemented, and then other times you spend days on something you thought was going to be trivial. We replaced the replication system with something better suited to our needs, for example. That said, on the whole we're pretty happy with Unreal (both the renderer and the materials system are very impressive).

Blueprints are extremely useful in prototyping at the very least, not just in the initial stages of development but for adding new systems. There is nothing wrong with them and the idea that LLM’s are going to replace blueprints is ridiculous. Sure, you will be able to have them write a block of collision code, but gamedev is one of the most complicated fields in terms of having an understanding of what your state is and what references what.

LLM’s can spit out code without understanding the problem, but understanding the problem is 99% of gamedev

Reply on news.ycombinator.com