But you will have to wait for at least one compilation, or two if you create the script inside the Unity editor. VS assets seem to do it faster or at a later point. The main speed problem with VS (related to writing code, not performance) is when doing basic math, but that could be sped up with some kind of smart expression node, so it wouldn’t need tons of basic blocks.
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I would agree with that. Doing basics math in visual editor can be pain. But other stuff, like textures / animations etc. then editor become very convenient. Specially when you can see changes live.
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No, I prefer Unity engineers solutions. This means that they can start with a clean slate, it will be free of legacy cruft with full control.
Don’t have to use the Unity solution. Your favourite assets would receive no performance advantages from being native to Unity. Unity does all this stuff in C# these days.
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Finally.
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Indeed finally,
Just for the heavy “art” projects alike: Visual novels, animation shorts with limited game-play impute this will be huge step forward. Hopefully is not “just” another simple FSM/ flow chart spaghetti thing, but one you can actual type in more complex math etc → like scirra´s Construct.
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This is not a problem with Visual Scripting. If they don’t want to learn how to code in C#\text they won’t learn to code (Although they should learn the basics of data\logic from VS). Visual Scripting has a few good applications, for example:
Dialogue
Dialogue systems normally go:
- Build the API (Pass some dialogue info to the dialogue system)
- Some way of serialising\deserialising the dialogue info so designers can create it \ give it to a character
- Add ways of visualising the dialogue info
- Add ways of changing dialogue info based on events or story data
Essentially you get to a poor visual scripting\custom scripting system anyway. If you just expose some nice Dialogue API to the visual scripting system you get all of that for free.
I think visual scripting should be used how Warcraft 3 uses it, as a way to create really custom behaviour or events using the really specific game API that you have made rather than building your game in visual scripting.
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This is great and i don’t think it will make people “lazy” or affect the future generation of coders. Actually, it will help a lot of people to get into pure c# since learning curve is quite steep in programming.
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Yeah, it reminds me a lot of Blox (and plyBlox). I can understand why non-programmers might find it very useful, but I just couldn’t handle working with it. For me, trying to create a script with Blox was a similar experience to trying to type a paragraph on an old mobile phone (which only had the numeric keypad).
I do agree about visual scripting being useful for high-level features – essentially, the things that game designers would typically be writing in whatever runtime scripting language the game engine uses. A spell system or world object interaction system would be coded by programmers, but specific spells and individual world interactions would benefit from being created using a visual scripting tool.
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Well I’m glad they’re going with something that looks a bit like Scratch. As I think that’s a much better than the spaghetti of Unreal blueprints. They could make it even more compact by shifting some of the data links to the right hand side.
What would make this a killer feature would be if you could do your visual scripting with keyboard commands only. Then nobody could say it’s slower than typing scripts because it would be typing scripts. It would have an intellisense for visual scripting. This would be quite easy to do by the looks of it just using arrow keys to navigate around the nodes.
Also you should be able to type in expressions like Mathf.sqrt(xx+yy) and it will either keep it like that or turn it into a collapsed equation-node (even typeset into a nice equation!). Because writing out math equations in visual language is not very intuitive or fast.
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Yes! Finally we’ll get even more shovelware 
We’re at saturation on that I think. There are so many existing “no code required” packages you can get for free even that this will just benefit artists and people who are also less likely to have coded before dipping their toes into game design.
just watched the video, and actually sounds like the most interesting part of it is
that apparently you don’t need to compile it, can keep working in the playmode!
While hot compiling sounds cool, in my experience its mostly a waste of time. Should initialization code run again? What should happen to the values of existing variables? What about variables pointing to this object? Its very easy for the program to end up in a undetermined state.
While its occasionally useful, most of the time its just too messy to be worth worrying about.
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Hot-swap is useful when you’re doing reactive systems. Like an event on a button click or something like that.
Obviously with initialization and maybe with tear-down hot-swapping an entire application is not a good idea. Although the Unity Editor is kind of doing that with the editor code.
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I LOVE THE IT! VISUAL SCRIPTING! SO AWESOME!!!
Im surprised by the negativity of this post I think this is absolutely amazing 
I’m a visual person and without visual programming I wouldn’t be able to create games or I should say it would take me forever, for some reason I just can’t remember the syntax when that big scary code editor is looking at me but visually I have the opportunity to create games and can find what I need when I need it for some reason its easier for me.
I’m so excited and can’t wait to start using it!
P.S. I have no interest in learning how to code, I just want to make games
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That’s what they said at Unreal…
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I don’t know what is the story with Unreal, but I can not fully agree with first statement.
While for most cases perhaps it will be true, in the end many games will be shipped using visual scripting.
I am not to judge at this stands weather is good, or not having full game on VS, but definitely affects such game owners (including haters who own game). Definitely, if game will end up somehow bad, VS will be just extra spark to the haters fire If good, perhaps will end up without of much storm.
Visual scripting will be a nice addition. Sure, the initial release will probably be so awful the backlash would drive weaker developers to suicide, but then the next release will be so much better everything is forgotten 
The extensibility is the best part of their plan. It wouldn’t be the least bit useful without that out of the box, because the team members who need visual scripting will usually ask for something they’ll have a hard time even cobbling together in that tool. That’s where we programmers ride in and save the day by making nodes for them to use like LEGO
It will also be interesting to see how far UT take the use of it. Visual editor plugin design, GUI FX and animation setup, network lobby configuration? Just kidding about that last part - that implies they ever finish the network API!
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From my experience, you can’t avoid Blueprints because pure C++ is very hard to use – need to use file paths, need to #include every component, no visual editor for the subobjects. However, I don’t have much experience there, so any experienced devs can call me out.
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Unlike UE4, Unity’s had visual scripting very late. This gave Unity a lot of advantages as the baseline code and components that make up typical workflows are very well established, so there aren’t any of the usual issues that could apply.
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