Blueprints, blueprints everywhere...

I've been playing a bit with Unreal Engine 4 lately, and while I appreciate the idea of Blueprints (which, in context, for those that unfamiliar with UE4, are essentially visual programs, with lines connecting them in sequence, different lines connecting inputs to parameters and to outputs and so on - google them yourself if you are interested), they - at least to me - seem to become horribly complex mess very quickly as program complexity grows.

You can of course use C++ with UE4 too, but it seems to me that that side is horrible neglected nowadays - documentation is out of date (supposedly latest document pages suggesting using already deprecated functions), there either are no examples at all, or they are too few and often too simple for anything past "hello world!"-equivalent and so on.

But then, after wasting a few days (well, evenings) building something that should be just about the simplest thing in existence I start to see why this might be the case. The C++ build environment seems to fragile as hell. Even with vast prior experience with C++ things just don't make sense (granted, that's usual first impression when encountering new, huge code base), and even most innocent looking change will blow up the code (with all the macros and UE4's own preprocessor magic) in unexpected ways, as well as making any compiler error listing full of stuff cause by said preprocessor magic. Combine this with the fact that almost all the examples are worthless videos (give me properly explained text with code snippets any day!) where I can tell the "tutor" obviously doesn't really have a clue what he is doing ... Well, it gets frustrating very quickly.

Just recently Epic announced that UE4 apparently has something like 1,5 million developers. I have no idea how they calculate that number, but I suspect that vast majority of these developers never really do anything with it - people in schools, or who want to play with it for a while and so on. I am quite certain that huge number of those never get past the first hurdle of starting with C++ code.

No wonder people won't even try and go to blueprints.

With all that said, I don't plan giving up. Persistence manages. Eventually. And after grasping the ... quirks ... of the environment it very likely will get easier and I can start focusing on the real code.