[vvanders]

> code due to being unmaintainable, undebuggable or unoptimizable.

I would argue that the shader editor in UE3 had none of these properties. It showed you cycle count and each step of the graph visually for debugging.

Also, I don't mean to be blunt but you aren't the target for those tools. Where they shine is when you have a level artist that needs to make a small tweak to how a shader looks. With those systems you don't have to loop in a dev to make it happen. You still need a solid tech artist to make sure things don't get out of hand and they're not a tool for every problem but in the domains where it aligns you see 10x gains on a regular basis.

[nineteen999]

I think rather than the shader editor (which uses a similar-but-different node based interface) they are referring to the Blueprint programming system in UE4 which effectively wraps C++.

It's extremely powerful, but it comes at a cost because it's nigh impossible to create diffs between different versions of Blueprints AFAIK.

I did see this (https://forums.unrealengine.com/community/community-content-...) the other day which looks pretty cool, essentially being able to embed some C++ at the Blueprint level, but I don't think that will necessarily solve the problem.

[zsmizzle]

They added a visual diff/merge tool for Blueprints in Engine version 4.7 (See "Blueprint Merge Tool" here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Support/Builds/ReleaseNo...)

[nineteen999]

That is neat, I'd never noticed that. Although in the context i've heard it discussed, it was more in the vein of "can't generate textual diffs/patch with them, as you can with C++".

[heavenlyblue]

>> It's extremely powerful, but it comes at a cost because it's nigh impossible to create diffs between different versions of Blueprints AFAIK.

Why not? What makes their representation undiffable?

[nineteen999]

I could be wrong but I believe the Blueprint assets are stored in a binary representation. So that rules out vanilla tools like patch/diff for the most part.

See the sibling poster, they did actually add a visual diff/merge tool in a much earlier version and I missed that.

[infinite8s]

Ascii is a binary representation. It's just that we've built up a lot of tooling around being to visualize/manipulate that representation. There's no reason that similar tooling couldn't arise for other binary representations

[nineteen999]

I'm not really sure what your point is. The point is ASCII/UTF-8 are a binary representation that is easily parsed by humans, which is why we use it for writing code. Sure, if you want, dump both files with xxd and do a diff on that instead.

There's been ways to diff binary files forever. Doesn't mean it is a great idea to store source code in that manner though. With UE4 you're not really supposed to be able to edit the Blueprint "code" outside the UE4 Editor.