Bolt 2 Alpha cycle has restarted

Unity Engine
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Hello,

We are inviting all of you to fill up this short survey to officially get you on our alpha list, understand your context better, your expectations, and where the efforts should be focused on.

My name is Laurent, Product Manager for Bolt Visual Scripting. If you have missed it, I strongly recommend reading our latest announcement regarding Visual Scripting in Unity. In short, Bolt is now available to all users at no additional cost. This is made to help all creators jump in Unity more easily and achieve their goals faster than ever!

Bolt visual scripting is now included in all Unity plans, at no additional cost.

Announcement on the Blog
Discussion on the forum

Now what about Bolt 2?

@UnityHas has mentioned in [a previous thread]( Welcome to Bolt 2 beta (coming soon) page-8#post-6076134) that the Alpha cycle had restarted, following some [initial details]( Welcome to Bolt 2 beta (coming soon) page-5#post-5959163) from @Adam-Blahuta , and I wanted to spawn a new thread to celebrate this, and take the opportunity to share a few more details, as well as collecting more information about all of you interested in Bolt 2.

First of all, why is Bolt 2 relevant?

Bolt 2 has been worked on for a while with the intent to bring Bolt based Visual Scripting to new heights. Bolt 2 is a rearchitecture of Bolt that will be fully integrated in Unity as opposed to be an Asset Store asset (Bolt 1 will stay on the Asset Store). It features C# code generation, which can be turned to platform native code reaching the same performance as writing the code itself. Script preview shows real-time side by side views of the graphs and code, also updating the current graph selection, allowing to learn C#, review graph code, and debug it more easily. Bolt 2 introduces classes providing object-oriented concepts to group graphs, functions and variables together. Variables are strongly typed and referenced, simplifying the maintenance for the graphs. And should feature many more new features such as Vertical Flow, Compact Units, Port Proxies, Tweening, Delegates, C# Events, Advanced Coroutines, Chunking, Generics, Port Promotion, Overloading…

One important thing to note is that Bolt does not support DOTS today. We have been working at providing Visual Scripting for DOTS based projects and this is still progressing. We are now discussing the necessary convergence across all our node-based graph tools.

Should I start Visual Scripting in Unity with Bolt 2 for my current production?

Short answer: no. Bolt 2 is not ready yet. Bolt 1 is stable and mature, and is fully supported by our dev teams for the duration of the current Unity LTS releases. So if you intend to ship a project with Unity 2018, 2019, or 2020, the proper option right now is Bolt 1 that you can get today from the asset store.

Now if you are interested in exploring Bolt 2, and help us finish it the best way possible, understanding that there are still possibilities that content made in Bolt 2 couldn’t migrate to newer alpha releases, and that a number of bugs still exists, we’re happy to get you on board!

I understand Bolt 2 alpha means it is not production ready today, but I’m still excited to join and provide feedback to help finish it, can I be invited to the party?

We know it’s been a long wait for some of you who have been participating in the Bolt 2 alpha before the acquisition. We want to get Bolt 2 alpha available to all to get your feedback, however we also judged it would be a better experience to start small and progressively add new users to the pool, up to the point we can open the flow gates to all.

So right now Bolt 2 is in private alpha, invitation only. As we consider more users to add to the pool, we figured it would be great to know more about your interests.

We are inviting all of you to fill up this short survey to officially get you on our alpha list, understand your context better, your expectations, and where the efforts should be focused on.

In the meantime, please join the official Discord server to chat with the team and other users.

We’re very excited by all of this, talk to you all soon.

Laurent

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Happy to see this moving forward! These are exciting times indeed.

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Thanks for making it available for everyone!

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Thrilled to see the progress and commitment to Bolt 2! :slight_smile: Best of luck, you got this!

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This is awesome! Thank You.

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Super Exciting!

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Thanks for making this available to everyone! Looking forward to trying out the alpha.

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Making Bolt Free is a very good move, thanks for that.

Thanks to the Ludiq team and Unity team also.

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Looking forward to Bolt 2! Hope this is going to be as good as many expect it to be :wink:

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Amazing.

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WOW! can’t believe you guys made this FREE!

Using Bolt for couple of years, I did not regret for one second paying for it. And don’t regret now either seeing it go free.
Happy to know that everyone has access to this amasing tool.

Looking forward towards Bolt2 and a wider integration.

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Looking forward to Bolt 2!

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Thanks for making Bolt free, as someone who bought the tool back while in Ludiq’s development, I think it’s what is best for the tool and the community. Also for Unity as it now has a standardized included Visual Scripting tool to compete with Godot VisualScript and UE4 Blueprints.

I can’t wait to get to work with many more new Bolt users, and maybe be able to help out some of the new users getting started. Also being able to collab with more people with the tool will be amazing!

Filled in the survey for Bolt 2. Can’t wait for the full release.

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What are your plans for Bolt?

Could you consider integrating shader graph, particle system,physics, terrain, foliage, mesh system and post-process pass into one cohesive unification with Bolt and SRP?
Like Houdini.

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Yes, we are actively discussing what are the next steps to progressively bring our various node based tools together, to unify visual scripting across the engine.

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First of all, why is Bolt 2 relevant?
I would say please watch this video to answer its relevance, these updates alone make it truly amazing to me (classes, bolt assets), I sooooo want to use the bolt assets to simplify the code identical to scriptable objects. That coupled with the interface seeming easier to use, I’m not sure I even want to try bolt 1 and am so ready to try bolt 2! It seems like this may be a long road ahead though?..

I’m a visual person and can’t program with C# in visual studio etc… my slight dyslexia makes it too difficult to write code (bouncing back and forth just to spell words correctly) but I’ve been using playmaker as of late and today decided to look into bolt as these programs make it possible for me to makes games! Im soo excited to use bolt 2.

P.S. I don’t need bolt 2 to tie in with dots as Im not sure I could wait that may years (maybe if considering it possibly do it in the background after bolt 2 is released :p)

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I am pumped for the move to make Bolt 1 free and the move towards Bolt 2 alpha. Curious about this statement: “Bolt 2 is a rearchitecture of Bolt that will be fully integrated in Unity as opposed to be an Asset Store asset”

Will this just mean we bring it in as a package, or does it actually indicate some tighter integration with Unity proper now that the product has been brought in house? Hmmm.

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Hello, I have filled in the questionnaire and signed up. When can I receive the new version of the document package?

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Looking forward to starting with Bolt 2 now that I completed my first Cross-platform app with Bolt 1.

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I will be soo happy if I can be part of bolt 2 Alpha Test …

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