[nadam]

Re-watching Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" was an interesting experience today. At the time of recording (2012) his talk was magical and ahead of its time. Today his principle (immediate feedback to the creator) is fully applied in tools for technical artists. (Unreal Engine, Houdini, etc...) It is funny to see what happened with his ideas: basically what happened is that the software engineer and technical artist roles has got really separated. For technical artists his ideas are everyday life today, almost trivial seen from 2024 (although they are not), although they work mostly not in text-based, but node based programming languages. For software engineers his ideas are not so relevant as software engineering is specializing on the more messy, more abstract or more complicated problems. Frontend development is somewhere in between. I think Tim Sweeney (and his team) is missing from the list, who I believe has seen this coming already in 2012 and built Unreal Engine to its current form.

[Fraterkes]

In what way do Unreal and Houdini embody "immediate feedback to the creator"? If youre just talking about Lumen and Nanite (which I think is a bit of a stretch), Blender arguably got there first with Eevee. I don't think Unreal even has proper hot-reload.

[nadam]

An example is the material editor. When dragging a value of a property of a node (like color) you see it immediately in the editor. You apply a material on an object, (regular object, water, Landscape), and while changing stuff in the node graph, you can see it applied to the object on the scene almost immediately (depending on some factors of course). A Material can be as complex as a Landscape auto-material which magically auto-generates the surface appearance of a complex landscape (with even foliage). But this is just an example, there are other node graphs in Unreal, like PCG. Hot-reloading my C++ code is not strictly necessary as I write C++ code mostly for really messy complex stuff, where I need to think a lot between tests. So I think Unreal mostly has immediate feedback where it is most necessary.

[scott01]

You can tune data assets while the game is running in editor. Hot reload works and is a crucial part of workflow in a lot of projects. The caveat, if I understand correctly, is that it works only for UObjects. I was surprised seeing UE recompiling stuff on my pet project on Linux, without doing any extra configuration.