If you do decide to build a scripting system for designers, I would recommend being very conservative with features and thinking twice before adding any new feature.
Mandatory link: https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
Unreal Engine 4 includes a visual scripting language called Blueprint.
That website collects some of the bad examples of what people do with this system - a lot of the times, the results are the visual equivalent of spaghetti code. In my experience, this kind of spaghetti is quite normal in shipped games.
Just to be clear, any type of spaghetti (visual or code) is common in any type of shipped software product (game or not), especially ones where there is deadlines.
It's not as if Rock Star can't find anybody qualified who wants to work for them, or any designers who are willing to learn to code in a powerful visual scripting language.
This attitude causes disasters like PHP's "Smarty" templating language.
PHP was already a templating language, but somebody got it in their head that there should be an iron-clad separation between designers and programmers, and that PHP gave designers too much power and confused them, and that their incompetent untrustworthy designers who refused to learn anything about programming deserved something even "simpler" than PHP, so they came up with Smarty.
Then over time the realized that their designers were powerless, so their programmers would have to learn TWO languages so they could wade into the Smarty templates to make them actually work with all the extra code they had to write because Smarty was so crippled, so they nickle-and-dimed more and more incoherent programming language elements into Smarty, making it EVEN HARDER to use and more complicated and less consistent than PHP, yet nowhere near as powerful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736574
DonHopkins on Aug 19, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: YAML: Probably not so great after all
One of the most ridiculous examples of this was the Smarty templating language for PHP.
Somebody got the silly idea in their head of implementing a templating language in PHP, even though PHP is ALREADY a templating language. So they took out all the useful features of PHP, then stuck a few of them back in with even goofier inconsistent hard-to-learn syntax, in a way that required a code generation step, and made templates absolutely impossible to debug.
So in the end your template programmers need to know something just as difficult as PHP itself, yet even more esoteric and less well documented, and it doesn't even end up saving PHP programmers any time, either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100226023855/http://lutt.se/bl...
>Bad things you accomplish when using Smarty:
>Adding a second language to program in, and increasing the complexity. And the language is not well spread at all, allthough it is’nt hard to learn.
>Not really making the code more readable for the designer.
>You include a lot of code which, in my eyes, is just overkill (more code to parse means slower sites).
https://web.archive.org/web/20090227001433/http://www.rantin...
>Most people would argue, that Smarty is a good solution for templating. I really can’t see any valid reasons, that that is so. Specially since “Templating” and “Language” should never be in the same statement. Let alone one word after another. People are telling me, that Smarty is “better for designers, since they don’t need to learn PHP!”. Wait. What? You’re not learning one programming language, but you’re learning some other? What’s the point in that, anyway? Do us all a favour, and just think the next time you issue that statement, okay?
http://www.ianbicking.org/php-ghetto.html
>I think the Broken Windows theory applies here. PHP is such a load of crap, right down to the standard library, that it creates a culture where it's acceptable to write horrible code. The bugs and security holes are so common, it doesn't seem so important to keep everything in order and audited. Fixes get applied wholesale, with monstrosities like magic quotes. It's like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing policy -- sure some apps get messed up, but maybe you catch a few attacks in the process. It's what happened when the language designers gave up. Maybe with PHP 5 they are trying to clean up the neighborhood, but that doesn't change the fact when you program in PHP you are programming in a dump.
One common application of node-graph editing is shader construction for rendering engines. For Octane, see e.g. [0]
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=octane+render+engine+node+graph+ed...
It's also very nice to visualize models of components of cars/planes in Simulink using visual computing and play around with various blocks and learn how they affect the stability of the system.
This a guy has very good tutorials in video form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY6Nl-OEhSo
Visual coding is still highly symbolic and structured, typically a directed graph representing data flow. The "visual" part is just a middleman so to speak.
I don't have a lot of experience with AI-generated images, but from what I've seen it doesn't look like its strength is generating highly structured/logical images.
- Blender's Node editor[1], used to create materials and describe post-processing flow.
- DaVinci Resolve Nodes[2], used to create reusable color grading profile (LUT)
[1]: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/editors/node_editor/...
[2]: https://www.makeuseof.com/nodes-davinci-resolve-beginner-tut...
But that made me wonder... will ever have "visual coding/scripting" outside of video game development? Sometimes I wonder that we are still in the "silent cinema age" of computer programming. Sure we have new and modern tools but in the end of the day it's still writing plain text.