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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

Epic is working on verse script now. Even they realized visual scripting is not the best way to do development. It's very limiting. I was much happier with UE when it had unrealscript. I still do game development on the old engines, but I don't like doing anything with the new engines that force you into c++ or blueprints. Code is simply more expressive than flow charts.

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If Unreal got proper scripting language support, I'd seriously consider giving it another go. I'd rather they go the Unity approach than the Godot approach and use a real-world language (C# is used outside Unity of course, GDScript is only used in Godot, though it does have bindings), but I'll take what I can get, clearly as I use Godot rather than Unity.

As it stands, picking up blueprints feels like I have to learn a whole new system which will go to waste if I decide not to stick with Unreal, and C++ seems like it'd be a pain to work with.

Edit: Forgot Godot had C# support. It still doesn't feel as "first-class" as GDScript, but its certainly more closely integrated than bindings, so maybe something to consider. Also, whilst I generally prefer a single language being tied to a single tool (trying to learn Raylib taught me this, where every example you find is in a different language), its nice knowing I can use C# without being locked into Microsoft

I wonder if building a custom language is a simpler way to optimize stuff later on?

For example, Unity uses C# but then you need either all of Mono at runtime or something like IL2CPP to compile to C++. And then eventually that compiler is constantly needing to keep up with language releases and new features. Or in .Net’s case new languages like F#.

I'm sure it is, no doubt its easier to pick an existing language than build a whole new one.

For me however, the benefits of an existing language outweigh the costs. If Godot were to use Python for example, you'd gain the full benefit of pip alongside it. If you use C# with Godot, I know you can use Nuget. I'd also personally rather a more performant language than one thats easier to write, but thats personal preference.

There are scripting languages integrations for Unreal done in form of plugins. For example: https://angelscript.hazelight.se/

I guess the problem with plugins is that you can only ever get a small subset of the community. For example, if I wanted to figure out how to create a new object instance in Unreal, I'd have to look pretty hard for Angelscript specific examples. Whereas if its native, presumably it'd reach a lot more people and the community would be larger for it (not always the case, but a fairly safe assumption)

I really liked unrealscript.

Part of my love was how both object State and networking were first class features of the language.

You could override a function based on "is the current object in the idle or shooting" state TRIVIALLY.

I found its use of inheritance very confusing; could be quite hard to figure out what something does exactly because it could be in one of the 6 parent classes. The experience turned me off from OOP for many years (later nuanced to just inheritance rather than all of OOP).

I was also very much a beginner back in the late 90s/early 00s (my only previous experience was BASIC), so I'd probably struggle less now, but from what I recall it definitely overdid it on the inheritance (which, to be fair, was still fairly new back then).

That is just Unreal Engine in general, UnrealScript just exposed the C++ classes. But UE's C++ classes have very deep hierarchies even in UE5 and many classes have tons of methods.

In general UE often feels like its programmers took all the best practices and then ignored every single one of them - which, considering how popular the engine is and for how long it had been around (the codebase started in the early/mid-90s), is a good indicator how much that stuff actually matter in practice.

Where did you read about verse? Last I heard about it was Carlos talking about it in a video a few years ago. I haven't heard anything since.

They seem to be designing it to launch with their special Fortnite version of the Unreal Editor which is supposed to launch sometime this year.

It’s not text but there’s a podcast with Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell person) talking about his new job at Epic working on verse. Starts around 50s in:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-haskell-interlude/...

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