Friday, February 5, 2016

"No Programming Needed" Game Editors and Visual Programming

Blueprints - Unreal Engine Visual Scripting (Free & Open Source & Commercial)
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/index.html

Node-based scripting system of Unreal engine, can be extended with C++ programming.
Links: http://blueprintue.com/ (Pastebin for Blueprints)

Blender Game Engine - Logic Editor (Free & Open Source)
https://www.blender.org/manual/editors/logic_editor.html
Event driven logic bricks, can be extended through Python scripting.

Amazon Lumberyard (CryEngine) - Flow Graph System (Free with Full Source & Commercial)
https://aws.amazon.com/en/lumberyard/
https://www.cryengine.com/features/sandbox-tools#features/flowgraph
Visual scripting system to implement complex game logic without code.

WIMI5 (Free)
http://wimi5.com/
Html5 game editor with node-based visual programming.

Scratch (Free & Open Source)
https://scratch.mit.edu/
http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Blocks
Blocks based visual programming language.
Similar Tools: Stencyl (Free & Commercial)

Blocky
https://developers.google.com/blockly/
Javascript library by Google, for building visual programming editors.

Gdevelop (Free & Open Source)
http://compilgames.net/
Event based system, can be extended using Javascript (HTML5 target), or C++ (Native target).
Similar Tools: Construct 2 (Free & Commercial)


Note: Basically, there are two most popular types of visual programming as scripting system in game editors - node & wire based and block based. My personal favorite is block based, more specifically, GDevelop-style. The reason is the presentation of logic in block based visual programming is "linear". Node & wire based visual programming is very flexible, but as the presentation can be non-linear ("messy"), it usually has low readability (just think the "wires" as the notorious keyword "goto"). Block based is more similar to line by line text-based structured programming, and it is easier to structure and organize, and hence usually have better readability. Scratch and blocky are too similar to text-based programming and almost have no advantages over text-based programming, so I think most programmers would not bother using them. GDevelop gives a better example of block type - the event driven, condition & action approach is very intuitive and convenient.

Others:
Goo Create (Free & Commercial)
http://goocreate.com/
Goo Create open source online WebGL game editor has a state machine visual programming system.

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