Thanks for the feedback, all! I can definitely understand the frustrations voiced in the thread. Balance between accessibility and power is always something we’re very cognizant of when making design decisions for the blueprint system.
To give some insight into our thought process, we never make conscious decisions to limit our users, and we always want to give people the ability to open up as much as they need. To end, you’ve seen stuff like Blueprint communications, interfaces, user-defined enums, expanded delegate (event dispatcher) support, support for passing of interface parameters around in Blueprints, etc. All these are an attempt to make the Blueprint system more powerful, and let you do even more things without needing to touch code at all. Compared to where we were a year ago, our internal teams have been able to make many more Blueprint-only games now without touching code. My favorite example is the Couch Knights demo we did for Oculus at GDC. That was a multiplayer, VR-enabled standalone experience, and we didn’t touch a line of programming to do it. That wouldn’t be possible in the beta!
Some that i see from above:
- Quat support
- “projecting from camera space, or working with actors based on their screen space coordinates has become a complete and utter nightmare” (are the Project / Deproject functions that are BP exposed insuffiient for your case?)
What else can we take a look at?
That being said, I know the API changes can sometimes be frustrating. The quat thing is understandable! Those that understand quats should be able to use them. Thankfully, nothing prevents us from adding quats in as blueprint types (one keyword is all it takes!) and we can expose the same quat math and helper functions we have in native code. Or, if you don’t want to wait for us, you can do it yourselves for your own project.
So, we hear your feedback! What would be really useful now is to get some details of things that have changed that you perceive as limiting the usefulness of blueprints. I see a lot of mentioning of things being less powerful than in the beta, and that’s totally valid feedback, but it would be really helpful to us if you guys could give us some specifics that we can take a look at to better understand where you’re coming from! Quats are a great start, but what else causes you to think that BPs are being nerfed?