I’m finding the whole Blueprints visual scripting to be a bit hit and miss for me personally.
Disseminating large JPG’s for listings is not ideal. There are is no equivalent of a quick easy to read script listing that you can post on the net, read in a book, view in a YouTube video. Large graphs may be functional for people who don’t code but for casual programmers who don’t want to use C++, Blueprints are the only alternative and there not ideal. There is no middle ground, C++ or dumbed down messy blueprints.
They are powerful when you can use them well enough to be creative.
Your opinion is valid as a user, no matter what the system is it won’t be ideal for a section of people. When UE4 first went several people started working on bringing in a text based scripting language. But, I don’t think they really tried Blueprints or C++. You can look that up and use that if you want. But, it won’t help with your copying from tutorials problem because most people are using Blueprints, with or without C++ so there won’t be many tutoials in that scripting addon.
Robert Manuszewskihas been working on Script Plugin, which is a plugin for building scripting language plugins. He’s been testing with Lua, but his plugin architecture is general enough that other scripting languages could be added with it as well. It’s currently requires that you build the engine from source since you have to add the Lua source code yourself, but once it’s stable I think that will change.
Performance is probably one reason for the change. UnrealScript was quite slow.
If they added in a standardized scripting language like Python or Lua then they would have to start dealing with porting issues associated with getting those interpreters running on all the hardware systems they are trying to hit. Porting to many different platforms is easier if it’s pure C++. C and C++ are the mostly widely supported languages on all hardware platforms.
Also, removing the scripting language reduces the amount of stuff they have to maintain and unifies the community into using a single language rather than learning multiple (BluePrints are ultimately C++ modules too, so they’re sort of C++ as well in a sense). C++ is the dominant language in the game industry, so overall the decision makes sense.
Admitedly however, visual programming can be klutzy and scripting languages are often more expressive.
There is not really change, extending of engine code (which C++ programming in UE4 is) was always there, but not accessible from free licences (like UDK). Also Blueprints are not C++ modules (and they not really C++ modules as they all being compiled own to machine code), it’s using same virtual machine that UnrealScript used, which are bindded to native APIs as most other scripting solutions, so perfermence is no diffrent from UnrealScript.
That might workflow reason as you say, blueprints are simply more accessible… and i think Epic didn’t expected so much C++ allergy in community
