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Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

godotengine.org

61–70 of 168 posts

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#61
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Godot user, I'm a Unity user, but the fact that you don't have to pay is one of the big draws of Godot. Unity Pro is $150/month per seat. The fact that it's open source is also big, because there are often bugs in the Unity engine that I can't fix since I don't have source access. A lot of devs also like jumping on new technology because it feels good to learn new things. Oh and then because it's open sourc…

I know quite a few game devs (side-effect of both living in Malmö and being active on the TiGsource forums) and if there is one common thing I hear about Unity it's how it does not seem to care at all about backwards compatibility, and how upgrades can completely screw over projects. I don't know what the story is with Godot (beyond the breaking changes between 2.0 and 3.0 that was mentioned in the linked blog post)…

Yikes. Does Unity do forced paid upgrades, so you'd have to deal with the incompatibilities?

Do they have a culture of incompatibilities so they can simplify their development and keep the best features and discard the worst?

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#62
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know quite a few game devs (side-effect of both living in Malmö and being active on the TiGsource forums) and if there is one common thing I hear about Unity it's how it does not seem to care at all about backwards compatibility, and how upgrades can completely screw over projects. I don't know what the story is with Godot (beyond the breaking changes between 2.0 and 3.0 that was mentioned in the linked blog post)…

Every version change, even minor revisions, come with a real risk of breaking your compiled asset bundles. From shaders to light maps to referenced classes. It's a huge amount of effort to keep a project tracking Unity version upgrades.

What do people do to deal with it? Are there services / libs that help you do the conversion?

Or is it that you can't fully trust them, and you'll need to do that by hand anyway, because you might be one of the exceptional cases?

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#63
post #59
post #30

It seems like some of you have some real love for Godot. How come you decided to use/recommend Godot over Unity when it was less mature? Was it much better along some axis that Unity didn't provide? What makes it better along that axis? Usually happens when something is 10x better at something new that people care about that the incumbent is blind to or is structurally incapable of addressing. I'm just wondering what…

I have been looking into godot every once in a while when it came up on HN and liked what you could do but was not convinced that I want to use it. Recently I wanted to write a workout game for the Oculus Quest for my own use and I am really impressed how well VR development works in Godot. I have never made a godot game before and never made a VR game before and it is really progressing nicely. An added benefit is t…

What convinced you to pull the trigger and use the Godot on the new project? Was it the VR development smoothness?

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#64
post #56
post #30

It seems like some of you have some real love for Godot. How come you decided to use/recommend Godot over Unity when it was less mature? Was it much better along some axis that Unity didn't provide? What makes it better along that axis? Usually happens when something is 10x better at something new that people care about that the incumbent is blind to or is structurally incapable of addressing. I'm just wondering what…

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/ef8jrh/unity_in_20... Here's a meme which is actually very illuminating. Someone in the comments mentions checklist-driven development, which seems about right. Unity doesn't feel like a complete product right now, it's full of systems which are either incomplete and badly documented or outdated and buggy.

I often wondered if that's the curse of building a horizontal product where you're trying to satisfy multiple types of users with different jobs to do (typical in enterprise products)

Or if it's just an inherent complexity in the actual job.

Or if it's an issue with management and product managers that can't decide which users to service, so they do the easy, but wrong thing and try to service them all.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#65
post #63
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been looking into godot every once in a while when it came up on HN and liked what you could do but was not convinced that I want to use it. Recently I wanted to write a workout game for the Oculus Quest for my own use and I am really impressed how well VR development works in Godot. I have never made a godot game before and never made a VR game before and it is really progressing nicely. An added benefit is t…

What convinced you to pull the trigger and use the Godot on the new project? Was it the VR development smoothness?

Mostly that it runs super smooth on linux and I do not have a high end laptop, so I wanted something on the lightweight end of the spectrum. I then came along a youtube tutorial about getting started with VR development on Godot by the main Godot dev. So I'd say all the stars aligned and I had a reason to try it out. The Godot discord is also a very nice place, as I got in contact with the developer who works on the hand tracking support. It's really very much like the Blender developer community, from the people hanging out there.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#66
post #38
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are migrating several modules from C++ to C#, by making use of their Burst compiler stack, and have introduced a new ECS based framework named DOTS, on the quest to appease to AAA studios.

I don't think its a AAA request, per se. Unity seems to constantly need features to slap on the box. At this point it feels like DOTS is significantly influenced by the marketing team. I mean, engineers would spell out the features and not wrap it up into this vague concepts of "DOTS."

It's wrapped up in a new concept because it's a complete re-architecture. You do almost everything differently with DOTS. And its driven by the CTO and Mike Acton from what I can tell.

I've been making a game with DOTS for the last year, so I've been following this pretty closely. DOTS is what convinced me to use Unity because I hated the old Unity way of doing things.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#68
post #24
post #23

We've just switched to Godot from Unity 2 months ago (we're doing VR), and I will never go back.

I’m curious as I’m playing around with these myself and trying to make a decision from a beginner’s perspective (right now I’m just rolling my own from scratch with libsdl, to get to grips with C++ and the fundamental concepts). What sold you on godot over unity?

Have you seen raylib? IMO (also using sdl, but making a 3-d engine and using opengl), sdl's standalone 2-d capabilities are--okay, but not great. It's capable enough, but the ergonomics aren't that great, compared to raylib.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#69
As a side project to get me back into lower-level programming, I've had the pleasure of working on a personal fork of Godot.

The engine's simply fantastic from a programmer's perspective. The code is readable, the architecture is quite intuitive, and with the exception of a few engine components, you don't run into much in the way of incomprehensible spaghetti code.

Adding features is more or less trivial, as has been merging upstream modules from more modern branches into the project.

I see a bright future for the engine, especially after the 3.1 update, and I anticipate that it'll start seeing significant commercial adoption in the second half of this decade (it needs a few more years of refinement and PR).

The release of the Vulkan renderer will be a massive boost to public interest, and developers will increasingly consider it for their next projects.

That said, I do have a few concerns about its development. I'll preface these critiques with the fact that I'm working from 3.1 stable, and have only merged from 3.2 as needed.

There's a wide-spread conception among the Godot community that Godot's performance (especially in 3D) is abysmal. This has been blamed on a number of factors, such as the memory model (largely heap-based), and the rendering engine (it uses quite a bit more cpu time than it needs to).

It is exactly the second-issue that has lead many community members to see the Vulkan renderer as Godot's salvation. I can't speak to that, but as is, many of the criticisms Godot faces are legitimate.

But among the projects I've seen where performance has been an issue, it's largely been the product of a developer's failure to understand how the engine is processing their content, and by extension their failure to architect their game around that.

This is an issue many inexperienced developers run into on just about any engine. Godot also lacks editor tooling that would allow anyone but a programmer to easily mitigate these issues in a scene, even if they knew where the performance issues were. This, compounded with the fact that Godot has largely focused on accessibility first and foremost has resulted in a lot of inexperienced community members without much understanding of the engine's internals to discourage people from even trying to adopt the engine for 3D projects until 4.0.

I hope that 4.0's release will be enough to minimize what I believe to be largely a PR issue, but I also fear that the inevitable bugginess that comes along with an entirely new rendering architecture may just exacerbate them, or that it will simply fail to live up to the expectations of many people who expect a more modern renderer to somehow fix their poorly considered code.

I'm concerned that this will slow the engine's development with respect to its tooling, as there are few people really testing the bounds of it's capabilities and workflows.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#70
post #66
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its a AAA request, per se. Unity seems to constantly need features to slap on the box. At this point it feels like DOTS is significantly influenced by the marketing team. I mean, engineers would spell out the features and not wrap it up into this vague concepts of "DOTS."

It's wrapped up in a new concept because it's a complete re-architecture. You do almost everything differently with DOTS. And its driven by the CTO and Mike Acton from what I can tell. I've been making a game with DOTS for the last year, so I've been following this pretty closely. DOTS is what convinced me to use Unity because I hated the old Unity way of doing things.

I don't know what DOTS is an acronym for, but if Mike Acton is involved I guess the first two letters stand for "Data Oriented"?
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