VisualScript is Godot’s visual scripting language, first introduced with the release of Godot 3.0, nearly five years ago. Although the Godot team has worked hard to improve VisualScript over the years, it never gained traction with developers, and the team’s own development path wasn’t clear enough. Because of this, the Godot team recently stated that they will completely remove VisualScript in Godot 4.0.

According to Godot’s recent poll data (with over 5,000 respondents), only 0.5% of users currently use VisualScript as their primary engine language. As you can see from this chart, VisualScript completely fell short of the team’s usage expectations.

The Godot team summarizes the collected data. There are two main reasons why few users are using VisualScript:

• For many potential users of scripting languages, they end up finding GDScript more suitable. And GDScript is easier to learn and use (even if they have no prior programming knowledge).
• While the basic functionality of visual scripting is already there, Godot lacks advanced components to use it. Engines like Unreal, Game Maker or Construct offer advanced game features packaged with visual scripting solutions. While users can make these features, they don’t come out of the box.

In addition to these two reasons, the official also mentioned that another reason for the low popularity of VisualScript may be that they fail to provide good documentation. There are examples for GDScript and C# in the official documentation, but for technical reasons, the documentation does not include examples for VisualScript.

For these reasons, the Godot team has officially decided to remove VisualScript from the Godot 4.0 codebase (it is still supported in the 3.x branch of Godot). Since VisualScript is implemented as an optional module, the relevant code has now been moved to a dedicated repository so that interested users can still compile it into it.

future

VisualScript can be converted to the official GDExtension via GodotCPP in the future for use as an extension. But for that to happen, volunteers will need to step up and help Godot make it happen.If you are interested in this, you can find it in the Godot Contributors Chat #scripting Channels connect with the Godot team.