Reply To: Some questions from former Unreal Blueprints user

[pawels]

Yeah, the Asset Store is way better than Unreal Marketplace – there is more stuff in general, more free stuff and more cheap stuff 🙂

The main reason why my friend decided to switch to Unity (I’m only helping him, so I’m not the decision making factor here; for my own game projects I use Visual C++, SFML and 2D graphics) were problems with terrain graphics – the landscapes in Unreal look pretty, but there are some serious limitations to them – the number of textures you can use is limited, and you can’t change the heightmap and terrain map at runtime. The first impressions of using the Unity editor are very positive – it turned out that creating terrain that suits our needs is much easier.

As for Blueprints vs FlowCanvas – both systems have their pros and cons. As I mentioned earlier, Blueprints are created more in spirit of class-based object-oriented programming – the visual scripts you create are tied to specific classes. This makes it easier to access variables and functions of other objects – for example if you have a variable of type Object Reference (Character), you can access variables and functions specific to Characters simply by dragging out a line from that variable and choosing a node from the context menu. This applies to user-created classes too – for example you can create your own class that is derived from the Character class, with its own variables and functions. And you can do it in Blueprints alone, without writing a single line of code.

In FlowCanvas, due to the way GameObjects in Unity work, the visual scripts are tied (as components) to individual objects or prefabs. It’s a bit different “philosophy of programming” that requires some effort to get used to, but I think we grasped it by now 🙂 Using custom events to communicate between graphs is really helpful. I like the event system in FlowCanvas – it’s simple and easy to understand, while I fail to understand how custom events work in Blueprints (there are things called “Event Dispatchers”, and I have no idea what they do).

Also there are some bugs in Blueprints that cause annoying behavior sometimes – for example if you add or remove an element in a structure definition, it can cause come connections between nodes that use the structure in question to simply disappear. I haven’t noticed anything like that in FlowCanvas so far 🙂