Unity Acquire BOLT Visual Scripting

Today Unity have announced they have acquired the Bolt visual scripting solution from Ludiq. This means the Bolts asset will now be sold by Unity, with community support and development transitioning to the Unity Montreal team.

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[AlekseyLoykuts]

They basically bought expertise in visual scripting, with active community. Smart move

[teknicker]

they acquired it and we have to pay for it, what a bolt move

[MadpolygonDEV]

Unity development and features just seem so random and messy, experimental stuff built on top of another. Thats why I just appreciate unreal

[gladiumcaeli]

Unity is probably doing this because their dot system might be taking longer than expected. But when it becomes and if it becomes free it would be amazing

[gvilas]

Yep, that's what Unity does lately, I wish they did the same with NGUI guy

[MaharbaRacsoChannel]

It seems that since Unity started planning on going public, they have been looking for extra revenue streams. One of these streams seems to be selling assets directly on their store. They have been selling 3d models for a while, maybe now they want to experiment with selling tools directly? This move also saves a product that helps Unity be more attractive from being lost to developer fatigue.

I used Bolt some time ago, in a job I had where they wanted designers to be able to contribute to game logic, to accelerate things. The thing is, Bolt has two types of graphs: Logic graphs, and state machines. Logic graphs end up being as much of a hassle as programming with code, only things get very messy more quickly. Logic graphs are also a lot slower than code (though I hear this has gotten better with Bolt 2). State machines are useful, but other solutions, like Playmaker or NodeCanvas seem a lot easier to use, easier to make them play well with code and just as powerful.

It just caused a lot of problems at the start in this job I had, because management didn't expect such a steep learning curve. A couple of people just ended up using some state machines from time to time, with code and logic graphs made by programmers. One person took advantage of flow graphs and used it to learn basic programming. I haven't seen her in a while, but I think she now prefers actual C# code instead of Bolt. Bolt could be very useful to learn programming for Unity, because it makes a very direct parallel with APIs through reflection. Bolt makes everything accessible, which may be the reason why things get messy quickly, but it also makes users familiar with Unity code. Bolt 2 is supposed to be able to convert graphs to pure code, which would make it even more useful for learning.

So, if Unity is not buying Bolt just to experiment with selling assets, a couple of reasons I can think of are: It is to be used as a learning tool. If they could integrate Bolt with their basic game templates and tutorials, they could have a friendlier way to introduce beginners to game logic. This strategy could even be useful outside of learning by integrating it with their Game Foundation initiative, by letting people make small games by way of kit bashing different Game Foundation modules without needing to code. Another reason is that, while in its current state, for the reasons I mentioned, it is far from filling the Blueprints from UE shaped hole, it could still be useful as a code base and collection of ides for Unity's own visual scripting.

Finally, with some modifications, and some modules made specially for it, it maybe able to compare to Blueprints. But why would they do that while also developing their own solution? So yeah, no. Bolt doesn't really fill that hole in its current condition. If they released it for free right now, marketing it as Unity's response to Blueprints, it would just impact their sales of other related products in the asset store, and disappoint a lot of people who would expect other things from it.

[nialltracey]

Have you tried out Nvidia's RTX voice yet? It's incredible for isolating vocals from background noise in software...

[JingIeFett]

Unity has been pushing Bolt hard from the very beginning despite there being other more established and production proven visual scripting solutions like NodeCavas. I'm 99% convinced the Bolt developers are friends with the higher ups at Unity and that's why they're pushing it so much.

[andrewzuo]

Very surprising that they bought another visual scripting solution after only recently announcing their own. It certainly is a bolt out of the blue.

[sitedel]

You may use NVIDIA "RTX Voice" solution to automagically remove all noises while keeping your high-end microphone. Even in beta RTX Voice works extremely well right now and even work on most NVIDIA cards with CUDA cores with a little removal in the setup's configuration file.

[_Garm_]

was actually expecting Unity to acquire bolt :D

[guitarpaul]

Bolt is free with Unity now! awesome news!

[FoXcodeZ]

I'm using Bolt (it was included to Unity Plus a time ago) and I'm like it a lot.

[android]

I had a feeling Unity would buy BOLT soon. They really needed to get an alternative to Unreels visual scripting up and going.

[whatthequack]

When bolt was released I purchased it instantly and use it in every unity project.
Since the first version I thought this has to be in unity by default. Looks like we getting closer to that wish.
It's a amazing tool for artists.

[brendangraham]

How you sort out your deadline for visual scripting and fail ... buy from someone else. Bought bolt many moths ago as playmaker failed to save scripts.

[BrainSlugs]

I like the headset, it sounded much cleaner.

[RodrigoBadin]

I am thinking why they are pledging to give free upgrade the plugin to 2.0 for those who bought until May 31st if the plan _should_ make it free for all in the end?
Maybe they'll release 1.0 for free then 2.0 will be paid? 🤔

[nERVEcenter]

At least visual scripting is declarative and, to an extent, functional, and is hard to screw up. That's a big advantage it has. Kind of like non-destructive shader node workflows. They're basically declarative sets of image processing operations.

[muhammadumair]

But they aren't planning to make it free for their user. We'll wait for it to become free. 😆