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Comment by jes5199 | Hacker News Reader

okay, so programmatic behaviors in the game are specified with a graph of virtual wires between “gadgets”. It seems like this is the always the metaphor that gets chosen to replace coding in text - but I don’t think it’s exactly good! How do you refactor? How do you share code?

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Refactoring I don't know but you can keep all your logic for some task inside a microchip then create input and output handles to hide the inner workings. Then you can publish that microchip as a element for other people to use in their creations.

From what I’ve seen it’s similar to the old LOGO Microworlds model which is awesome.

I did some collaboration on a pretty simple project (Mosaic Maker) in Dreams a few months ago. Just creating modular components that could integrate with a larger scene was somewhat tough but not terrible. Versioning them and updating them was somewhat harder. I think as groups get better at this, they'll get the hang of it. But the sharing layer built into dreams was pretty bad at the time. If you had a few versions of different dependent components, you could hit bugs preventing you from working on them. If your component used someone else's (which is encouraged as one of the pillars of the game), you might find you're blocked from releasing if the creator restricted that component. Or sometimes the opposite: people didn't get credited for what was clearly theirs.

Overall I'd say that collaboration patterns could work if you had a group that knew how they work and supported them.

Not this. But if you use the block languages and JavaScript side by side, sometimes the graphic one ok but most of the time the text JavaScript mode is so much faster. Our visual nerve has 50% of our brain. But text is much more dense.

You can't. But people like to pretend we are all just taking a piss with our text-based languages and full-time jobs.

I feel that Penny Arcade nailed it when they described the game as:

"Using clumsy tools for days and days to make a worse version of something that already exists inside of someone else's product"

If all they can see is people recreating existing things they have a pretty narrow-minded view of this.

Also, people who use this wouldn’t otherwise be firing up the Unity editor.

I agree with this perspective. It allows people to enter an industry early and then let them grow their skills over time.

I am a fan of dreams and littlebigplanet, but this really IS a big element of the community mindset. It doesn't mean everything made in the game is bad, but you do need to filter out all the Silent Hill, Sonic, anime, etc clones to find the worthy stuff.

That would be the description of programming, right? Because that's how I always feel when I start writing a game from scratch, instead of using some click-and-play game maker.

This is coming from two guys who have made “drawing shitty cartoons bitching about popular video games” into their day job.

I find this attitude odd. No one is going to use node-based programming to build a CRUD-app backend. I think some non-game programmers feel threatened by ways of building behaviour that don’t need a computer science degree. The attitude in the games industry is necessarily the opposite. Programmers aren’t game designers or artists or puzzle designers and part of their role is to let those creative professions express themselves, which leads to a richer experience.

I hope software continues to empower creative expression in new ways like this and the barrier to entry keeps being lowered.

>I think some non-game programmers feel threatened by ways of building behaviour that don’t need a computer science degree.

I don't understand this motivation. Did they get the computer science degree only because they thought they needed credentials to be allowed to program? I mean, most of the clearly started programming during their college time but before they received their degree. Node based programming is done by beginners because learning a text based language just isn't a very strong barrier for anyone who is actually willing to invest the time. How long does it take to learn 50% of the most commonly used programming language syntax constructs? Maybe a month? Maybe less? Before you say that it's impossible to build a mental model that is useful for programming in one month, I am strictly talking about the interface to the computer (syntax/nodes). You still need the same mental model with a node based language.

I personally read a C book when I was a teenager and I basically grokked the syntax in the book in 7 days (not the entire language). The difficult parts were actually obtaining a mental model of things like pointers and how the heap and stack works, not which words or symbols to type to satisfy the compiler.

I think I was being too specific when I mentioned a computer science degree. What I wanted to convey is that these types of entry level, or “layperson” ways of specifying behaviour can seem threatening to those who have invested in a career in software development. Understanding pointers and memory management and compilation is often orthogonal to solving the problem at hand, unless the solution would benefit from such understanding (maybe due to performance or memory constraints, or a level of complexity that warrants it). This is, after all, why the industry has developed higher level ways of writing software, like scripting languages or higher level compiled languages. These tools let us trade off low level control for higher productivity. I think another axis of abstraction is in the UI of software development itself: trading away some of the ability to build arbitrarily complex systems in any domain in order to lower the barrier to entry.

People do “real work” with dataflow languages.

LabVIEW is pretty popular in some circles, and many DSP/FPGA tools also use a component+wire model. Verilog is text, but uses a similar model; there’s even a wire keyword.

GNU Radio is one of the most common ways to make something using an SDR module.

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