visual coding rule

paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 268 points –

https://twitter.com/b0tster/status/1744529728680161615

55

something something rewrite it in rust

is Bevy good I haven't done anything with it yet

I like Bevy a lot. Should you use it in your next commercial game? That's debatable (although I'm trying to đź‘€). It's definitely a lot of fun to use with its ECS focus if you're wanting to just make games for fun or whatever.

My advice to 2021 lilith and 2024 lilith is to write code

Might be harder to get started, but waaay easier to maintain

I kind of understand the appeal of blueprints, for small projects and quick proof of concept maybe. But never understood how can anyone do any serious or complex work with it. It just felt so limitting when I tried it in Unreal, never bothered with plugins for unity.

I mean, I think a lot of times it is drilled in to people as “best practice” for working in a larger organization.

To some extent this makes sense from a managerial perspective, like, you can move people between projects and expect them to pick up where the last person took off since it will be somewhat intelligible.

I’ve seen some nightmares though where projects were barely function because a bunch of unnecessary stuff was added to make it fit the shape.

Blueprints are faster to develop with in Unreal Engine, as it's quite literally built into Unreal Engine and doesn't require compiling from a separate program. It's even got live node previews to show you exactly what is being run at specific times, so it's easier to debug in too.

It really shines when you want to prototype a lot of things really fast, especially to get the game working first before the optimization step of moving functions and backend stuff over to C++.

I have some experience with the visual coding that Godot has/had (they're deprecating it) and it looked like a useful tool for, say you've got an artist on the team who does all the creature models, the visual code stuff would be good for them to program the behavior of some little background creature in. Like I could see doing the AI for a chicken in it. Wander a random distance between 1 and 5 meters, peck(), play cluck.wav, scratch(). That way the programming that's really the artist's job can get done, but the REAL coding work like game logic can be done by the programmers on the team.

Again, this feature has been deprecated.

i hate programmers they make me scare in my brain. why can you not have normal jobs like wood cutter and fish catcher

If you do any code work, read this:

Robert C. Martin - Clean Code

Please don't, at least at the beginning, Uncle Bob is widely reputed to have done as much harm with his OOP work as he has done good, if not more.

I mean I like what is at the core of his suggestions. If you don't take it as a religion but add a dash of flexibility on it then I think it is quite useful.

This is the way. There's some good advice but it's not universally applicable. The problem is, Uncle Bob defends his philosophy as if it was, diminishing the advice's reputation.

Look don't be dogmatic with anything. Read it. Understand everyone has opinions. There are tradeoffs for every engineering decision. EVERY decision.

Learn to weigh them yourself and learn the intricacies of where it doesn't make sense and where it does

I'd appreciate some qualification on "widely reputed" + "as much." I'd concede it's common knowledge that dogmatically following his advice is a mistake, but I'm surprised by the claim that his advice is mostly harmful.

This is why I love Blueprints; it forces you to keep your code neat and tidy and readable and documented lest it turns into an absolute mess. It's also so much fun to prototype in because it's like modular synths and you can just make an absolute mess if you want.

So, the argument is that the system is so unwieldy that it forces you to be good because if you aren't vigilant you'll fuck yourself? Where have I heard that before?

Where have I heard that before?

I’ve heard it from dynamic typing proponents

Yeah I’m not sold lol

You also heard it back in the 24kb of ram days.

It's also so much fun to prototype in because it's like modular synths

I'm sold.

Blender's geometry nodes and shader nodes also work this way and are incredibly fun to just mess around in creating bonkers procedural textures/shaders/objects and seeing what comes out the other end. I very much liken it to a modular synth but for your eyes

I cannot express how much this intrigues me

In that case I should also mention that Blender is 100% free to use forever (free and open source software ftw!!) and that you can hardly throw a stone on YouTube without hitting a tutorial on how to use it.

Here's a video about how to make fractals using geometry nodes: https://youtu.be/N9Tnmbnl9Yw

And here's one listing every shader node: https://youtu.be/cQ0qtcSymDI. Keep in mind that these can be combined with virtually no restrictions on what you can plug into what!

In essence, geometry nodes build procedural 3D shapes and shader nodes decide what color they are, how reflective they are, whether they emit light etc. You can also apply these factors to only part of the geometry in procedurally generated patterns.

You can either build the geometry by hand and then slap some shaders on top (I like just slapping down a flat plane or a cube or w/e with some stuff next to it for light to bounce off of and seeing what cool things I can do with it) or go fully procedural and use geometry nodes too

I will warn you though that the interface outside of the node editors is not especially intuitive (nothing could be, with the amount of controls Blender has) and you do need a somewhat beefy computer for Blender to perform well, especially if you plan on using the fancier graphics features like raytracing (which I highly recommend -- the Eevee renderer which uses rasterization instead is orders of magnitude faster but the lighting and reflectivity does not look anywhere near as good. Fine for actual 3D animation but if you want to play around with a light synth, Cycles is 100% the way to go)

I will look into this all. Thank you very much. My PC isn't that good but it'll chug along and maybe I can borrow a friend's for some rtx fun.

Edit: also, my phone it 10x better than my laptop so if there's any good android apps I'd be interested too.

Dang is Lilith not on Mastodon yet? I used to follow her on Twitter and now I iust realized how much I miss her toots.

I never liked Bloodborne but the Bloodborne Kart meme was too good not to fall in love with.

Same here! She always has such fun posts but i can't see anything without a twitter account :(

ElI5?

Creator of the “DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO” series angrily shakes fist at past self’s shoddy work.

twitter user made some code in 2021 that she can no longer understand due to how complicated and poorly organized it is

Yeah Ive done that when updating some mods I made. Im all "Why the FUCK did I do it this way?".

What "language" is this?

Looks like blueprints in ue5 to me

You're correct, I saw her get asked about what she thought of it. And for context, she's a 3d modeler/animator who has never written code in her life, and this is what she used to program Bloodborne Kart.

Maybe you can just get Midjourney to make you a picture like this and call it a day?