sava28

"visual shaders are a much friendlier and easier way to write shaders! you do have to know stuff like that absolute value is a function, not an operator. also you can't write comments or label anything so you just have to sort of intuit what's going on. there are previews for every node though! but they always show a white square so good luck with that. also if you want to work with colors you'll have to decompose and recompose them yourself" i feel like i am losing my mind

eevee @lexyeevee2/22/2024, 7:03 AM

YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE A REVOLUTIONARY IDEA IS IF YOU COULD SAVE A BUNDLE OF NODES AS ITS OWN NEW NODE. LIKE SOME KIND OF LITTLE REUSABLE THINGAMAJIG. WOW I AM A GENIUS

eevee @lexyeevee2/22/2024, 7:08 AM

it's like they've laid a trap for me specifically. this shader would be four lines of actual code that i could've written by now, but because you can convert visual shaders to text and not vice versa, i feel like i should do all visual shaders because they're the less... lossy format??

eevee @lexyeevee2/22/2024, 7:11 AM

i'm choosing "plus" from a dropdown with my mouse rather than just typing a plus sign because the whole industry has decided this is the future, and it's easier than making shaders actually fucking debuggable

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

wiggler @wiggles2/22/2024, 6:58 AM

so much programming accessibility stuff is like “syntax is hard!” and then extremely throwing out the baby with the bathwater

eevee @lexyeevee2/22/2024, 7:01 AM

no one understands all this gobbledygook like +. what would really help is [unveils corkboard covered in red yarn]

wiggler @wiggles2/22/2024, 7:03 AM

have you seen https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ ?

eevee @lexyeevee2/22/2024, 7:06 AM

you know that game shapez? what if it was your real actual job

@yuubi2/22/2024, 3:11 PM

like ~~telogic~~ ~~rational~~ ibm rhapsody? (xml to c++, leaky abstractions, not actually documented useful anywhere i was able to find)

fluffy @fluffy2/22/2024, 7:30 AM

One of the few things that Unreal's material Blueprint editor does at least vaguely okay is that it has comment blocks.

But that doesn't even remotely make up for the absolute hell that is the rest of Blueprints.

I have pretty severe chronic pain that is made much worse by typing. Visual programming models are even worse. The various hand motions that go into dragging lines between a handful of nodes to add two fucking numbers are way worse than just typing fucking a + b.

fluffy @fluffy2/22/2024, 7:33 AM

VRChat's native scripting system, Udon, exists because Unity doesn't let you package C# assemblies into an assetbundle. For some reason they decided that the primary interrface to Udon would be through a fucking visual editor.

Fortunately the visual editor just generates bytecode and someone else wrote a C# frontend which makes it way less obnoxious to work with. There's still a lot of super awful limitations with data structures and such but at least you can use code to write code.

Archytas @Archytas2/22/2024, 4:02 PM

It's telling that the most successful implementation of visual code (UE Blueprints) is really only used because it doesn't require recompiling the engine :P

I've tried visual shaders and even tried using it for state machines in Godot - just always really cumbersome and unnessessary.

Designers though love it! (Where I can write new nodes for them in source)

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

B.I.E. Unit: Explorer-B @GoopySpaceShark2/22/2024, 7:14 AM

this only proves that blender dropping its game engine was a mistake

Sunfire, in theory @sunfire2/22/2024, 8:28 AM

godot has this fun thing where you can write your own custom visual shader nodes, thus negating the fact that you don't need to write code to use them 🫠

i do prefer visual shaders for wholly subjective reasons, but boy do i not regret knowing both

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

Gay Eminem on 9/11 @DecayWTF2/22/2024, 7:16 AM

Everyone just keeps reinventing useless 90s RAD tools forever

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery2/22/2024, 8:09 AM

people have made fun of gamemaker shaders because you just type the code but like, I've used visual shaders in blender and yea it's great for visualizing stuff but you end up with spaghetti

signal eleven @widr2/22/2024, 12:44 PM

someone's boss thought that was really cool and smart because it's the only shit they understand

fluffy @fluffy2/22/2024, 6:14 PM

Love how UE4's shader editor at least gives you a "math" node but if you have a single typo in it that causes the shader to fail to compile, the whole fucking editor crashes

Stephen @stephen-fox2/23/2024, 2:21 AM

Not the same attempt to do 'accessibility' but... I'm being reminded of my attempts to deal with languages with syntax designed to resemble regular english reading this.

One for college, one because 20 years ago one of the major IF languages (INFORM 7, I think?) decided to go that route. Resulting in me wrestling with things like 'This line of code does what I want it to, this line of code doesn't, and my dyslexic ass is even less capable of determining the difference than when I missed a semi-colon at the end of the line'.

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