Re:Godot Engine – Free and open-source 2D and 3D game engine
by dkersten on Friday September 22, 2017 @06:53AM
(#15310942)
Visual languages have been very successful in other tools (material/shader languages in 3D tools, Blueprints in Unreal Engine has been very successfully used by game designers). I assume that Godot was influenced by this.
Have you ever used a visual language in ernest? I've used Max/MSP and Max4live, which are successfully used by many non-programmer musicians and artist. I don't think many of these people would be successful with (or even bother to use) a textual programming language and I think many designers who love Unreal Engine's Blueprints would similarly not fare so well with textual languages. My experience using Max was that it was a breath of fresh air, in many ways superior to my day-to-day experiences with "real" programming languages (eg for exploratory problem solving, it was amazing, and for games where you likely need to make many little tweaks until it feels right, I can see this being a major advantage). Sadly, Max is rather limited in terms of data structures (can't even have nested lists!), but that's a shortcoming in Max and not in visual programming tools.
So, in summary, I disagree: I don't think its wasted resources at all and think its a great idea, especially to get more non-programmer users[1] and welcome more stuff like this.
[1] From what I've been reading, lots of non-programmer designer/artists are making games with Game Maker and Blueprints and such tools. The more you can do without "real" programming, the better, IMHO.
Have you ever used a visual language in ernest? I've used Max/MSP and Max4live, which are successfully used by many non-programmer musicians and artist. I don't think many of these people would be successful with (or even bother to use) a textual programming language and I think many designers who love Unreal Engine's Blueprints would similarly not fare so well with textual languages. My experience using Max was that it was a breath of fresh air, in many ways superior to my day-to-day experiences with "real" programming languages (eg for exploratory problem solving, it was amazing, and for games where you likely need to make many little tweaks until it feels right, I can see this being a major advantage). Sadly, Max is rather limited in terms of data structures (can't even have nested lists!), but that's a shortcoming in Max and not in visual programming tools.
So, in summary, I disagree: I don't think its wasted resources at all and think its a great idea, especially to get more non-programmer users[1] and welcome more stuff like this.
[1] From what I've been reading, lots of non-programmer designer/artists are making games with Game Maker and Blueprints and such tools. The more you can do without "real" programming, the better, IMHO.