I just started using Unreal 5 to prototype a VR game (lots of quirks but this engine is amazing). I’ve been writing C++ for 5ish years now and am pretty comfortable with it. I’ve also been slowly converting all the blueprints in the VR template provided by Unreal to C++ for a few reasons and was curious if these effect you.

I tried using blueprints for awhile, but it just feels so cumbersome and time consuming. I can bang out 10 lines of code basically as fast as I can think, but converting those same 10 lines of code to blueprints often involves much more time. You have to click around a bunch, rearrange the routing wires, make it look readable, abstract a lot of stuff into functions that usually don’t need it just because it helps condense the blueprints. Then the blueprints end up sprawling a large area and are very difficult to keep in my head at once (whereas it would normally take less than a page of C++ code to write it out and you can easily hold that in your head).

Basically, I was wondering if these downsides to blueprints effect you much or if you’ve developed suitable workarounds? I want to like blueprints, but the time it takes to click around and make it readable is painful, in my opinion, more painful than compile times for the C++.

Blueprints are fun to work with, but the amount of time it takes to drag and drop nodes around to make the equivalent of a for loop feels incredibly unproductive. The result does look visually pleasing though!

I really hate BP and wish we get something better. The thing is, technically you are supposed to do gameplay in BP and push the core ones to C++, but BP is so messy after a short while.

How big is your team? How do you code review? How do you unit test? How are you maintaining 3 year old blueprints?

This will work just fine for small indie games and teams where the code is thrown out after a year, but there's no scaling this. I've worked with enough 10 year old Max/MSP patches to know that you will have an unmaintainable mess of wires that is as good as garbage after a while.

Larger teams typically use Blueprints to prototype but then rewrite in C++. This is a perfectly fine use case, but ultimately you still need it "written down" for the maintainability.

tl;dr Blueprints are a tool in the process to writing C++, they aren't a replacement.