I took a look in verse today. Currently I find the current iteration very complex and will block a lot of creators moving forward with what (past the peculiarities) seems like a simple and well-written language. Imo even v1 needs an interface, otherwise we cannot justify this being UGC-friendly language (imo UGC scripting tends to either have very friendly and easy to understand code, or interfaces/wizards to guide you through).
I ll start with the tough questions first (it’s not that I don’t understand why, its more of “can UEFN handle it for me so I can script faster”):
-Why do we use underscores instead of spaces?
-Why do we need to declare classes?
-Why do we need to write “@editable”?
-Do we need “void”?
-Do we need “logic” word in conditions?
I feel there is so much room to simplify the script without reducing the flexibility of Verse, whereas giving focus to the core elements of each scripting line.
Since Verse is marked as a new scripting language, I believe it is a golden opportunity to move away from programming rules that are now deprecated with what we know and how the technology has progressed. Btw correct me if I am wrong, I am not a programmer (but I have tried programming on a few occasions).
I think Verse is great as a core back-end scripting language, I think what is needed is a mediator that acts as the interface to the UEFN creator (the person creating the experience) that speeds up the process and simplifies the action of scripting (think macros but within a single word of script).
For example, “move” as a scripting macro can entail a full paragraph worth of code in Verse, but behave in a default manner in an interface where you can simply say move and the actor moves. Then, with a context-sensitive, extra menu past “move”, you get preferences to edit that pre-defined, most-commonly used movement script, using other “macro-words”, like “distance”, “towards”, “back”, etc.
Reading the example posted below
and I wish scripting required less writing. It currently takes 8 lines of code to print a log message. I am probably looking at this wrong, because I keep comparing this with Kodu v2 which did the same thing with just one tile iirc (WHEN blank (runs once or constantly based on action) DO Print | the only thing added was the print tile in its interface + print msg was shown to player too). Probably an interface could hide superfluous information from a user.
In this case, I would love to make a new verse script, drag it into the map, write print “hello”, save then it works on game start.
Blank code can be code too, with a pre-defined behavior.
I want to build a full game in an hour, I want an agile tool to help me be fast. Fast prototyping is linked with creativity imo