Godot game engine reaches 2.0

Some meta discussion: "xyz reaches/releases version number 234234.324234" is entirely meaningless and the best way to ensure that nobody will care about your release announcement. Your project may internally have a very well defined and entirely logical policy as to how exactly to change version numbers based on internal project changes, but from the outside this is 100% untrustable and invisible, meaning your 2.0 release could mean anything from "we rewrote the entire thing" or "a set amount of time went by" (see Firefox/Perl/probably others).

If you actually care at all about your release announcement being read, include in the title line the actual benefit the new version provides to people.

The features page looks well presented but has anyone actually used Godot? What are their experiences with it compared to writing your own games from scratch?

"From scratch" isn't the right metric, you'd compare it to unity or unreal. The key difference is this is actually open source so you have 100% control over your own distribution and licensing.

I haven't looked at it in 6mo but back then on the 1.x branch there were many, many thoroughly polished example games ranging from 2D (platform / isometric / tile) to 3D (third person, others i forget).

Normally you get 1 incomplete mechanic as an example, not an actually playable "game" with more polish than most app store stuff.

I was pleasantly surprised with these polished examples, but at that time the docs were not that thorough (cursory look tells me they've improved), but the examples pretty much made up for it. Almost any game you'd want to make you could start with their example and build out.

I'm excited it's growing. I'll probably play with it for 7DRL.org in a couple weeks.

One thing I don't get with game engines: why do they feel the need to make a X-like scripting language, where X=Python in this case, and X=JavaScript in Unity's case?

Why do they make people re-learn the specifics and slight differences of a language that has been around for more than a decade? On top of this, they are making their engines more difficult to maintain: bug fixes, new features, deprecation and backwards compat., keeping docs up to date, writing tutorials for the language, etc. etc.

I just don't see why these engines want to re-invent the wheel, even though what they end up with is simply a slightly modified wheel. /endrant

The engine looks cool however, and the fact that it's FOSS makes it a better option for budding game devs. I might give a go when I decide to make a simple game.

There's a history of reinventing the wheel in game development just for the sake of doing so.

Until Unity became popular, everybody was doing their own game engine for their own game. All those game engines have their own image formats, sound formats, archive packing format, etc. None of this is ever open source, of course...

And before you think "in the name of performance", it's usually actually in the name of premature optimization and ends up being a bad idea. Reinventing the wheel indeed.

Edit: I've been in the games industry (specifically, in reverse engineering and dealing with these exact issues) for a decade and this is all true, and from experience. I see I'm still being downvoted, without any reasonable explanations though. If someone here disagrees, I'd like to hear it.