Is it real growth, though? Or income alignment, mixed with a healthy dash of AI over-enthusiasm…
3 Likes
Just to let you know, there are so many devs that I know hate BP. It’s ok for achetyping and prototyping but it can get easily out of control in team development. You spend more time managing BP than developing.
But rest assured, Epic is working on Visual Verse, where you can toggle between text and graphs. Problem solved for good.
Feels just like what NVIDIA did, ditching the consumer market in favor of pleasing AI investors exclusively. In the end, they got a stupid amount of money quite fast.
All of UE6 is Tim pushing his silly Fortnite metaverse while opening the doors to AI companies, at the detriment of the old guard (us developers) who just wanted better tools within the current engine we’ve spent years mastering.
The more I learn about the path ahead, the more depressing it looks. Call me luddite I suppose.
8 Likes
Well that might be a thing, but from my experience to properly use blueprints you’d want to accustom yourself with not only the blueprint tools but also how it integrates with the C++ back-end.
I find blueprints rather powerful for driving visual effects and joining together different functionality that I’ve written in the back-end. It is much easier to create easy-to-follow logic with latent actions in Blueprint graphs than in C++ code where you’re hopping from one function to another.
Honestly I think the bigger issue is that Blueprints give out way too many tools for their own good - it lets you build things inside of it that you really should be building in the C++ backend instead.
The people who hate cleaning up blueprint mess will also be hating cleaning up a verse mess. At some point people might realize the Holy Grail does not exist but you actually have to learn how things work at a deeper level rather than try putting together a mess with only surface-level understanding.
I do share the worry that this is another push into a narrow kind of direction at the expense of everything else, because nothing else than what’s in the focus matters. Unreal has had issues with trying to compose functionality and right now if you want something re-usable / configurable from level design perspective you often have to build your own spawn scripts which is annoying to say the least. But there are also clear advantages with the actor-driven workflow, I’ve tried the entity-driven pipelines, and compared to what we have here, I dislike them.
3 Likes
I think payback time is coming for people like NVIDIA. When the AI frenzy dies down, and they realize the world just isn’t going to need all these data-centres. They will have to come back cap in hand to the consumer base, that may wall have moved on by that time…
4 Likes
Yes exactly. Replacing a well-established high level language with a newer, less-known high level language will not solve this problem.
Basically they are throwing out the existing knowledge base for their ecosystem and recreating the same problem again in a new form.
This seems like such a poor move.
6 Likes
(post deleted by author)
JUST DON’T unless you have something better to replace, and by better i’m meaning also compatible for tons of blueprint users experiences and has easy transititon/learning curve. I don’t understand why try to change something already works. I’m 3d artist and i’m creating my own game with blueprints atm and got really good at it in years. Thats exactly why i worship to Unreal Engine because it removes the technical obstacles and now you are saying we are going to rip out the spine of our Engine? And if you have a plan to replace it with something you should also release some news about it when announcing this news to ease up people’s worries.
4 Likes
Yeah this one hit me like a kick in the balls. I like visual scripting. It lets me worry about the logic and forget about things like “do i need a coma”. LLM’s are great and all, but I enjoy actually being able to do it myself. As well I am an artist first and BP works the way my brain works. BP is how I went from just making levels and static props to full games. I’ve been using UE since '99. Looks like UE5 is the end of the line for me.
I’m also a bit mad about how they just rushed and glossed over it. Kinds of scummy.
8 Likes
It appears that if actors and blueprints are truly going away, then verse must be production ready. Blueprints and Actors are the foundation of the engine, so to have a full overhaul like that is not something that is so easily done.
The fact that they acknowledged that blueprints and actors would be removed during a later update in UE6 leads me to the belief that they still are not quite sure how they are going to do that, and are most likely just figuring it out as they go along. I expect UE6 to have some great features, but to be a mangled mess of c++, Blueprints in the process of being depricated, and Verse code features that are not well documented. I sincerely hope to be proven wrong though.
I personally hold no interest in publishing to fortnite, and find UEFN fairly underwhelming, so hearing that UE5+UEFN=UE6 does make me worried because I don’t view UEFN as a positive.
I talked to people at work and they share similar concerns. My immediate thought, is that this might just be a time where the community has to just fork 5.8 and find their way on their own.
I understand that not everyone likes blueprints, but that really isn’t the issue that worries me. UE is built on blueprints, and that isn’t just a quick plug-n-play when switching to Verse.
When Epic said “learn this coding language that interfaces with C++” I spent 10 years doing that. Now they’re telling me the same thing again, and I am hesitant to do so. I just don’t trust that they won’t pull the same thing again.
6 Likes
If Epic Team somehow makes a new visual code for UE6 much easier to read/understand to make prototypes faster than blueprints then I don’t see anything wrong with it as long as it is as accessible as blueprints which requires no prior coding experience.
Keep in mind they haven’t shown the alternative of what the new visual coding looks like, perhaps they will explain this when UE 6 is close to its release date. As for now, there is no need to worry without knowing solid information on what would be the new visual codes for UE 6. Finger crossed 
1 Like
“Actors and Blueprints will be in early versions of UE6. Eventually, these will be deprecated when the new framework is sufficiently mature”
But I doubt it will happen over night. This seems to be a segway. Kind of like how Image-Line did Fl Studio years ago when they removed pattern blocks. They began warning us that the feature would be removed in future revisions.
1 Like
I feel like as a community, we should make a petition to stop blueprints from being discontinued. It feels unacceptable. So many of us got into development through blueprints and have spent so long learning/using them. I genuinely don’t think id like to continue using Unreal if they decide to retire blueprints.
8 Likes
I have never even installed Fortnite, forget thinking about making anything for it.
Without blueprints/visual scripting, Unreal would be unusable for majority of indie devs, like UDK was (and it had Unrealscript most people never wanted to use). I looked at the verse script and it looked like gibberish to me as a non-coder.
Ditching visual scripting for some AI nonsense will 100% alienate so many devs who are non-coders but comfortable with visual scripting. Such a weird decision, without even asking the majority of the community.
4 Likes
I think the logic is that newcomers from here on out are primarily going to be vibe coding, hence, Verse is more suitable than trying to retroactively make BPs agent friendly.
Blueprints is literally the only reason I use unreal.
With Unreal Engine I’ve worked in Cinematic VFX, Real Time Cinematics and Game Development for about 15 years now.
Blueprints is how I wrote my game. Thats how I write my cinematic tools. Thats how I write our companys pipeline.
I am not a fan of UEFN, Verse, FAB and Gen AI integration.
I’m sorry but if they remove blueprints I’m running out of reasons not to just start using blender instead.
7 Likes
I agree with you 1000%
1 Like
I agree
1 Like
Absolutely agree
1 Like
I can see how that could be convincing to epic executives, but I do think it’s a bit foolish to build your entire next iteration of the engine based on fears of what Roblox will do to the gaming industry, and the current affordability of AI during the AI bubble.
The fact of AI is that it currently isn’t turning much of a profit for any companies. They are all in fierce competition to give users free stuff in hopes of choking out the other companies and being the last one standing. This is just like how netflix an early streaming services were incredibly affordable, but now have more limited libraries and higher prices. Not everyone will be able to afford these services, and it seems a little foolish to build on such a shifting foundation in the current AI market (regardless of how powerful of a tool it may or may not be).
6 Likes