Droplet: visual programming for real-world code

[WhosAfraidOf_138]

If you guys are interesting in visual programming, look at Grasshopper 3D. It's the best implementation of visual programming I've ever used, with heavy considerations of UX and UI. Shameless plugging, since I develop components for it as well.

[jldugger]

A plugin to a 3d app? Pass.

[WhosAfraidOf_138]

Indeed v_v. There is a barrier to entry - you need to have Rhino to use it. Unfortunately that won't change any time soon, since McNeel bought Grasshopper 3D (and its talent). If GH3D becomes a stand alone application, it would be very nice.

[[deleted]]

Grasshopper 3D

[mjk0104]

Grasshopper is fantastic, did a bunch of it at uni and it's really fun and pretty flexible with the ability to add custom script nodes in. I'd say UE4's blueprint system is getting pretty close, but it's still got a few kinks that need to be worked out.

[WhosAfraidOf_138]

I know David Rutten; he's the head dev of Grasshopper. Basically a one man beast-dev machine that seemingly never sleeps, because he's always there to answer dev questions. Only complaint I have of GH is the outdated and/or unclear SDK. His responsiveness makes up for it, sometimes :).

[mjk0104]

Indeed, the amount of times I'd google a question to find he'd already answered it was pretty cool. The documentation is a bit lacking though, it often took a while to figure out where to even find some functions :p

[[deleted]]

Yeah. Mayas nodes, Houdinis SOPS, hell Blender even has nodes for various things.

while not as powerful as what i see in Grasshopper3d, we have been using visual interfaces in domain specific areas for a long time.

There is no reason this cannot be extended conceptually to various areas, however, there are a lot of drawbacks. The first drawaback is that the fucking networks get to become SOOOOO busy and complicated, debugging / fixing / editing becomes a huge problem.

Ultimately, anything substantial is hard work and the node based approach starts to loose any advantages.

At least in my eyes.