Under the Blueprints: Parsing Unreal Engine’s Visual Scripting at Scale
In Unreal Engine, a popular game engine for AAA (high budget, high profile) title video games, Blueprint Visual Scripting is a widely used tool for developing gameplay elements using visual node and edge-based source code. Despite its widespread adoption, there is limited research on the intersection of software engineering and Blueprint-based visual programming. This dataset aims to address this gap by providing parsed Blueprint graphs extracted from Unreal Engine’s binary UAsset files. We developed extractors and a custom parser to mine Blueprint graphs from 335,753 Blueprint UAsset files across 24,009 GitHub projects. By providing this dataset, we hope to encourage future research on the structure and usage of Unreal Engine Blueprints, and promote the development of tools—such as code smell detectors and language models for code completion—that can optimize visual programming practices within Unreal Engine.