Unity Visual Scripting

One of the most requested features in Unity, beyond dark mode in the free edition, is some form of Visual Scripting language like Blueprint in Unreal Engine.  Unity has been working on an experimental version of Unity Visual Script and earlier this week dropped the 3rd experimental version as well as a sample to demonstrate how it all works.  Keep in mind, this is extremely early and in no way is it for use in production code, nor is it documented… at all.

Another thing to keep in mind is the Visual Script in Unity is only for their new DOTS system, meaning it won’t work with existing MonoBehaviour code.  It was explained why in the 2nd drop:

In this particular case we realised that there are quite a few mature solutions that most of the community is using successfully for visual scripting. We didn’t think that what we can build on top of MonoBehaviours in terms of visual scripting would have been a massive improvement over solutions in the asset store.

On the other hand we saw an opportunity to focus VisualScripting on DOTS. Specifically enabling artists & level designers to write incredibly efficient multithreaded game code, by expressing their intent simply and the code being generated taking advantage of DOTS. The data centric nature of DOTS opens many new opportunities for visual scripting and interop with other code based systems.

We think a combination:
* Generating high performance visual scripting code out of the box (C# job + Burst + great memory layout)
* A UX language that reduces noodle graph-ness, by supporting stacking and other dedicated UX paradigm
* A straightforward path to transition from Visual Scripting -> well organized DOTS C# code
* Amazing debugging tools deeply integrated into DOTS & Visual scripting

If you are interested in a Visual Scripting system that works with existing Unity code be sure to check out Bolt or PlayMaker on the Unity store.  Check out the new Visual Scripting system in action in the video below.


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