Epic Team,
I am not a super experienced programmer but I do have a good bit of experience in PHP, and immediately when starting out with blueprints, I found it frustrating that you moved away from coding terms (Like using “Branch” instead of If-Then-Else) in some places. It would be absolutely fantastic if you made it a priority to stick to traditional programming terms. I kno your trying your best to accommodate to non-coders, however they are still going to be using coding techniques and it makes it great for those of us who already have a somewhat decent coding background but don’t want to have to learn a new language such as C++.
On another note, I got super excited when I finally found out about Data Structures and Data Tables, Arrays, Sets and Maps. These are great tools. However, and maybe its my lack of deep understanding behind how blueprints work outside of Actual C++, however I find myself extremely frustrated often when dealing with data as I am accustomed to using Arrays in PHP which also has powerful built in Array functions for Merging, Sorting and the like. I have found in Blueprints that Arrays, Maps and Sets could all be merged into just simply arrays if Arrays were setup to where Keys could be Numeric or Alpha-Numeric Keys along with Numeric or Alpha-Numeric Value Pairs. You could then combine all the functions for Maps, Sets and Arrays to all work on Arrays (For the most part) by having Built in Functions for Merging Arrays, Sorting Arrays, Finding Keys and returning the Value or searching for the Value and returning the key. As well, it would be great if the keys and values could be variables as well so that you can dynamically generate keys-Value pairs. I find it EXTREMELY aggravating that I have to utilize a temp variable to save the Map info, remove it, then add the updated key-value whereas in a traditional array you can simply update the value for a given key.
Maybe this is not possible as I am not familiar with C++ and maybe Arrays are not even setup in such a mnner in C++, however, if at all possible this would be tremendously user friendly, intuitive and powerful for Blueprints.
On a similar note, I was trying to find out how to sort and came across some info on creating blueprint node to access C++ features for sorting and create a custom new blueprint node. It would have been awesome if you guys had this pre-built in as I had to then install and setup Visual Studio which I had troubles with and I could not get the code to work. I HIGHLY suggest attempting to put all or as many as possible C++ functionality into Blueprints (Such as C++ Array Functions etc.) if at all possible.
You guys are developing an amazing engine and blueprints are amazing in it’s self. I absolutely LOVE working in blueprints and would be tremendously impressed if you eventually built it up to the point where Blueprints pretty much has all of the functionality of C++ that it possibly can.
Keep up the amazing work!