[sbensu]

[post author] I am familiar with those and have used a couple. There are similar examples in music, where visual programming dominates.

The implied audience of this post (not clear) is people writing business applications, web dev, etc. The examples are picked to reflect what could be useful to those developers. In other words, all the examples you mentioned are great but they are not how a "software engineer in a software company" does their job.

[jcelerier]

> In other words, all the examples you mentioned are great but they are not how a "software engineer in a software company" does their job.

creating blueprints or max/msp programs is definitely software engineering, it requires you to think about correct abstractions, computations, data flow and storage, etc.

also, there's currently 398 Rust jobs worldwide advertised on linkedin, vs. 1473 for "unreal blueprints"

[felixgallo]

game developers are definitely software engineers in software companies.

[munificent]

My experience is that the software engineers at game companies generally hate the visual programming tools. They want to work with code. It's the game designers who (sometimes) like using visual tools.

[jayd16]

Some are bad but Blueprints is great. Main issue is they don't always play nice with text based coding tools.

[voidUpdate]

I spent about a year working with blueprints a while back and I found some things just really annoying. like making the execution line go backwards into the a previous block. if you do it straight there, it wont let you, if you use a single reroute note you get an ugly point, so you have to use two reroute nodes to get it to work properly and nicely. Also they don't have all the nodes you need so you end up having to write some new ones anyway

[amonith]

And AI - which kind of changed the game in the recent years. A "blueprints copilot" akin to Github Copilot will be very difficult to create because there's no "blueprints text" to train an AI on. Nowadays in my hobby pet projects I find it easier to write C++ with copilot than Blueprints.

[jayd16]

There's a JSON format of the blueprints that you can see when you copy/paste. Its just a bit ambiguous than the usual binary format. Its not an impossible problem at all.

[amonith]

Not an impossible problem only in theory. It's currently practically impossible and will take at least a year to solve if anybody starts to work on this at all.

Since my current project does involve wrangling AI to do stuff - forcing it to output a consistent, complete, large JSON with an exact specific format is very difficult and takes a lot of time (you won't be able to draw Blueprints line by line to show to the user that AI is processing). Definitely no autocomplete-like experiences maybe ever.

For example, look at the text representation of these 6 (!) nodes:

https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/yl8hd3-8/

It's enormous.

And the second even bigger problem: On forums and basically everywhere all users share screenshots with descriptions. There's not enough training data for anything meaningful.

I tried to force copilot/gpt to output even a small sample of copy-pastable blueprint and it just can't.

[Capricorn2481]

Of course, but you know what they're saying.

[barrystaes]

Developer here that started doing Analysis work for complex systems that require some thorough Bsuiness Modelling. Take a look at

- BPMN https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Model_and_N...

- MDA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-driven_architecture

- MBSE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-based_systems_engineer...

The tooling on these for Analysts I feel is not on par with tools for Developers. Often outdated and enterprise-only both in price and complexity of use.

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-driven_engineering#Too...

Any more insights welcome. At first I expected to find a complete “draw a model, generate api + sourcecode with validation functions” ecosystem of interoperable ecosystems. Apparently the market is not there yet.

[gopher_space]

I've been looking at using Godot for desktop apps, and seeing how the game world thinks about memory has given me a ton of ideas.