hi all, after releasing a few boring apps I’ve been dipping my toes in to the games making business but haven’t quite settled on an engine. I’m mainly in to the design side of things but as an indie it isn’t uncommon to get my fingers dirty with a bit of coding. I’m fairly well versed on programming concepts these days and know a few different languages including C# and lua but never touched C++.
I like the look of unity with it’s asset store, strong community support, C# use and easy deployment among other things but it’s not very well optimised for mobile and pro features are a bit costly. After watching a few vids I’m quite impressed with unreal’ technology and blueprint just looks amazing; all coding needs to be like that! Would have to learn C++ though for the back alley stuff.
So my question is just how much of a game is possible in blueprint alone and what are the typical areas that you would delve in to hard coding for? In the context of unreal could I get away with winging it a bit until I’ve picked up enough of C++ to go a bit deeper? I’m thinking I could absorb a few tutorials, build a few prototypes then move on to something aimed for release and during that time gradually learn enough C++ to get me by. Does unreal use C++ in it’s own particular way at all, in a similar sense to how unity has it’s own brand of javascript?
Blueprints is C++ exposed so in order it’s like translating German as in blueprints to French which is C++ to English which is machine language the puter understands as instructions.
The nice thing about blueprints is how the game should function can be worked on by both content and coding teams and the visual code can be copied and pasted into notepad giving the coder a road map as to where the code block can be hard coded into C++.
Extremely flexible as you can work an idea like a digital doodle, hard code it if performance is needed, or left the way it is if the impact is only a few more bits and bytes added to the mix.
my main concern is how blueprint handles some of the logic stuff that you would wrap up in classes. I’ll have a good read through that link (thanks ) and figure out it’s limitations and uses. I like the idea of being able to get loads done without coding and then palming off any heavy lifting to coders if necessary.
No matter what they selling you, blueprint is programming, just wrapped up in a different skin.
loops, virtual functions, Class heritage, arrays, structure, Enum, contructor, are all present in Blueprint, just presented differently. (The one thing I haven’t found is pointer, but I can do without them).
End of the day, the logic is small. If you can think in C++ logic, you can in Blueprint.
It can get messy, but yo can say the same about coding, epecially people who do not bother to layout the code nicely or use comments.
I haven’t keep up with complier for a while, but blueprint save a lot of syntax errors, & remembering function names & their parameters. Best of all, its all done within UE4. But coding has improved in 4.5, & you no longer need to retart your editor when you build your code.
Hard question to answer as there is yet anything out there that either proves or disproves in full the impact as to the extensive use of blueprints has an unacceptable impact as to performance. I’ve satisfied myself that blueprints is not something to worry about but something to keep an eye on and is nothing more than another consideration as part of the overall design of the game, if it matters.
Decision making though that might make it easier as to use blueprints or hard code is if the event is scripted as being unique or is an event that is running in real time.
In my experience though it’s not until after you release and thousands are playing your game is where you find out one way or another so setting up an alpha test is almost a must these days.
