They want to remove Blueprint in UE6

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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Well, I do code, I love Blueprints, and I really enjoy my solo development pipeline in Unreal. I can code in C# too, and I also know some custom engine pipelines.

However, just as a heads up, changing engines, let’s say to Unity, does not automatically solve these problems, even if it has powerful visual scripting.

1- When you change engine, you also change the whole codebase and pipeline. Eventually you still have to read code in some form, even if you do not write much of it. Also, Unreal comes with many handy systems that we often do not realize are fundamental to making games: movement systems, AI, PCG, physics/Chaos, Gameplay Ability System, audio, animation, input handling, UMG, materials/HLSL, data tables/data handling, and so on.

When you move to another engine, you have to learn new systems and decide what to use, what to buy, what to write yourself, and what fits your project. For example, in Unity you may need to write, buy, or integrate solutions for things Unreal gives you more directly. Not defending or promoting UE blindly, just saying the reality of changing pipelines.

2- Things will always change. You may join a big AAA studio and work with a custom engine that is not used anywhere else. That is good and bad at the same time. Technologies and approaches change, but the wisdom of what we can do with tools stays.

3- When you change engine, I can almost guarantee there will be at least one part of it that you, and probably many others, hate. If your work does not touch that part, great. If it does, you deal with it.

With a strong Unreal background, learning another engine would not take that much time. But sometimes switching engines also makes you understand Unreal better.

Even if Blueprint is deprecated, in practice that kind of transition would likely take years. So I would not panic-switch engines just because of this and the version you did your game with is here to stay.

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The thread has now settled down, I think it might be worth you opening a discussion as a what is realy going on asking for clarification

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That’s how I feel.

I have mild dyslexia and nerve damage in my left hand no doctor can figure out, so typing and debugging code takes me ages. My background is mostly in level design/enviro art, so blueprints also tend to click better in my brain. If they deprecate bp with no real replacement, I’ll goto another engine.

At least with Unity or something, I could slowly trudge thru a somewhat familiar c# syntax instead of spending years learning another UnrealScript again with Verse, only for that to be deprecated in ue7.

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But I’ve been working with UE for two decades. I’ve known UE since UE 3 and what are they doing? That they had visual scripting and it didn’t work for them? Let them put it somewhere and the world will move on without them :wink: They still have a year and a half of Early Access… let them eat it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi @Light_Shock ,

I think the problem is, not many people really know much about what’s going to happen.

( Plus I’m not particularly knowledgeable in any of these areas )

I know Epic are getting rid of BP because it can’t be multi-threaded, and it is a bit dumb to have a 12 core CPU, and only use 1 core. I don’t really know that much about it, but I don’t see why you can’t have a multi-thread capable visual coding language. Either way, you need to be aware of when, and when not to be, thread-safe.

As far as the AI goes, leave me out. I understand that ( also ) Verse is much better for AI, because it can easily be digested and re-written. But I really hope there is a bit OFF switch for AI. Not everybody wants it.

It’s not like MMO is the only way forward, there are a LOT of games, and gamers, who are exclusively interested in single player experience.

As far as scene graph goes, maybe it’s going to have the same effect as Nanite / Instancing. Right now, you have to build up to a fairly high number of actors ( or amount of detail ) before the benefits kick in. If you aren’t modelling a vast open world, leaving them both off is usually better. I don’t know how that’s going to work with SG.

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Making the code multi-thread should be the compiler’s job either way. If they can compile Verse to multi-thread, they should be able to do same for blueprint. At worst, I could see that leading to some limits on how much code any bp event or function can run at a time. But if they were to add a function/event budget and give nodes a rough cost value in the tooltip or something, that might be a good thing by itself as it would ween people off creating massive spaghetti functions that try to do too many things at once.

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I’m pretty sure it’s been known that compilers can’t make arbitrary code parallel since something like the 70s I’m afraid :slight_smile:. You have to write specifically thread safe code.

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Yea, the low level part that spits out the final compiled code can’t magically make it thread-safe, but the pre-compile in tool which does error checking could have guard rails. Like if two functions are trying to set the same var and aren’t clearly run in series (ie customevent-> set potato=true → somefunction {do things, set potato=false, return:potato} could be fine), it could throw a warning about a possible race condition and tell the user to fix it. Docs and guides could also be updated to explain the basics of thread-safe code.

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Just because technology advances, it doesn’t mean you have to advance along with it.
Most solo developers create low-poly games or ready-made graphics from the asset store because it requires much less work. That way, they at least finish what they started.
Besides, new features, high-end graphics and massive file sizes don’t define a good game.

Unreal Engine has always been developed primarily to meet the needs of more ambitious game studios—which at least pay royalties to support the project’s development—rather than to cater to the whims of ungrateful developers using it for free and keep complaining and making a storm in a glass of water.

What changed? What has changed is that now they also want to make it easier for players themselves to create content for the games, using AI, MCP, etc. This isn’t some wild new idea that popped up out of nowhere; it’s something that has already been tested with Fortnite.

Most people here aren’t the target audience for this new product. Just accept it—it hurts less.
Instead of switching to Unity, you could switch to UE4 from 10 years ago and pretend that nothing has changed (just kidding :grin:).

It is not yet certain that the blueprints will actually come to an end.
I would bet they wouldn’t be able to get rid of it.
After all, as I mentioned earlier, a Nodes/Graph editor solves a different problem than a Blocks/AST editor.
And specifically on this, not even the Unreal developers have more experience than I do (if I may say so myself without sounding arrogant).

But yeah. Change is painful. People hate change. Especially when they imagine it’s for the worse.

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That’s what people have been discussing since the beginning, discussing about how UE6 doesn’t seem to be targeted at the user base that Epic themselves have grown up to 5.8, which is in itself quite an odd choice.

The way I see it is a lot simpler than what it seems like: Tim has had this big dream of competing with Roblox for decades and is now simply forcing his own ideals into its own product, whether we like it or not. This is also apparent by reading his tweets.

I feel like the better move would have been to make 2 different engines, UE standard (continuing from 5.8 to eventually 6.0) and UEFN (which is what UE6 promises to be). In fact, I’d say UE standard could even be split further between UE videogames and UE multimedia, because as of now we’re getting a severely bloated software that tries to be a jack-of-all-trade for a multitude of different industries.

“providing players the ability to decide their own setting preference is always good”

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Rockstar Games also considered that possibility in GTA 6

“Industry reports and discussions indicate that Rockstar Games is developing a robust creation platform, aiming to transform the game into a massive social ecosystem akin to Roblox or Fortnite.”

“Rockstar has been meeting with top content creators and hiring experts in creation platforms. The goal is to enable players to build their own experiences and potentially earn money from them..”

“Speculation suggests that UGC will range from custom missions and mini-games to fan-created media (such as in-game radio stations or TV shows), featuring monetization systems based on engagement time or marketplace purchases.”

Below is their opinion from 2024: Strauss Zelnick is the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the parent company that controls Rockstar Games (August 9, 2024).

https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/74625/take-two-ceo-zelnick-has-doubts-about-ugc-dominance/?trk=public_post_comment-text

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Not really a new development there. Way back in San Andreas we found hooks in the game to load user made .scm files (essentially R*North’s equivalent to a level blueprint written in a proprietary language that ended up looking like some sort of weird compiled basic). But after we found Hot Coffee, the world changed, suits at T2 panicked, and the official script tool was vaulted. They also asked us not to share the trick for how to load scripts made with our tools from the hidden unfinished menu in game, and we sat on it until the storm died down. For that matter, the first community site that posted mods for the first GTA was originally hosted by Rockstar, but the suits at T2 didn’t understand modding and cut us loose.

TLDR: R* has been thinking about user content for ages, Take2 has just been holding the leash.

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It took a while for it to sink in.
But they changed their minds—so much so that they bought FiveM.

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Yea, they slowly caught on. Before I left gtanet during the 4 era, they were we talking with us about ways they could designate modded servers so servers which used mods wouldn’t blow up the ant-cheat (and to quarantine us lol).

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Another thing to consider is that these companies still have the Metaverse in mind—a topic that stopped being discussed following the AI ​​hype, Meta’s failure and etc.

Renting servers for businesses - and thereby create a third ecosystem on top of that - is a better option than pirated servers.

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The metaverse is fine and all, but why not just make it an option when you start a new project (like now you can choose blueprint only or c++), and if you chose metaverse it uses Verse instead of bp? I have a side-project game with humans, where using Fortnite skins could work. My main project tho features 120cm tall goblins that wouldn’t work well among 192cm tall Fortnite chars. They wouldn’t be able to walk thru my doors, and my tiny goblins would be rather unfair if used in a Fortnite match lol.

Tho I must admit, it would be amusing if I could use Cuddle Team Leader as a boss in my main game. :stuck_out_tongue:

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But one thing won’t change: you’ll still be able to choose between C++, Verse, Blueprints, Scratch-like blocks, etc.

If they were to remove Blueprints, someone would likely create a plugin to bring them back. And then they might change their minds again.

There are various strategies, each with its own strengths and weaknesses:
“Putting all your eggs in one basket” can sometimes mean “Having greater focus.”
“Divide and conquer” can sometimes mean “Wasting energy” and failing to achieve either goal.

There is no “Silver bullet”—only choices.

In practice, a project split in two is almost always abandoned. Examples include Unity’s support for Linux, Unity’s support for JavaScript, and so on.

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For now, yes, they say 6 will ship with blueprint support. But what’s worrying to some of us is they also said they plan to deprecate bps. If epic doesn’t want spend money on continued bp development, that’s fine if they leave the hooks in the engine code (like the bpexposed flag in c++ classes) and let the community take over development/maintenance of a blueprint plugin. I just worry they might want to push the metaverse thing too hard and deprecate all traces of blueprint out of existence in some future version to bait us into robloxnite.

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BP is done because it 100% relies on Actors. Actors are out because that’s the main choke point.

The community will create a plugin for verse visualization. End of day UE is changing. Period. We need to learn verse or lean on a plugin.

Im fine with it. My entire career has been learning language after language and countless software.

It is what it is. Hate it as much as you want. Get on the boat or stay at the dock.

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Not sure it’s entirely accurate to say BPs rely on actors. 99.9% do because they inherit from a c++ class based on actor, but stuff like retargeters don’t even touch an actor, just skeletal mesh uobjects. I guess technically a retarget graph isn’t a blueprint, per se, but it’s obviously based on the same framework. If they make a new generic c++ entity class to replace the actor uobject, I don’t see why they couldn’t expose it to bp to some extent. Even if it can only do suff to things contained in the base class and yells at you to use Verse if you want to add components or something. Obviously the lack of multi-threading with blueprints would be a major drawback (unless they can fix that) but it would at least preserve the ability to prototype stuff quickly and let artists bang out simple things that could just run in main thread without summoning a programmer or engineer every time they want to add a trigger or light switch to the level or something.

If someone (Epic or otherwise) makes a visual verse graph editor, great, sign me up. I’ll even give Verse a chance before I nope out. Part of me kinda does miss the simplicity of typing “if then” to do something mundane like check a bool instead of wiring up a cluster of noodles for a branch.