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Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

godotengine.org

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Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#81

Post by blihp »

lwb wrote: post #6

Great post. Is there a 3-year, 5-year, even 10-year roadmap for Godot? It's a tool I'm very interested in using but the industrial backing and stability of Unity/Unreal is hard to beat. Some kind of assurance that the creators of Godot plan (or at least hope) to keep working on the project for a long time would go a long way.

The developers have stated their intention to continue development long term... funding permitting. So the way to help ensure you get what you need is to help fund its development. Looking at Godot as a free resource and then expecting anything from the developers is setting yourself up for disappointment.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#82

Post by mhh__ »

m0llusk wrote: post #72

That the Godot scene editor is made with Godot seems to be an excellent example of how eating one's own dog food can exercise and improve the basic technology.

It's fairly common practice in compilers (for good reason), i.e. the D compiler is now written in D and the Rust compiler is written in Rust etc. I think the first Haskell compiler was written in Miranda but that's before my time.

You get to test the product without waiting for feedback from the real world and you also end up with a test suite (in effect) for free.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#83

Post by nineteen999 »

MattRix wrote: post #37
iamwil wrote: 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'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 wonder why this discussion always falls to Unity and Godot; Unity source is not available, while Unreal Engine source is.

Unreal also has more features available than both engines out of the box, as far as I am aware. I don't want to sound like an advert, but the shading and Blueprint systems in UE4 are extremely intuitive and easy to work with, and the C++ is definitely managable. I've never used Godot, but the last time I compared Unity to UE4 it felt extremely clunky. Lastly, prototyping stuff in UE4 is fun, once you get used to it and develop your own workflow.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#84

Post by jayd16 »

learc83 wrote: post #66
jayd16 wrote: 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.

Unity is making some good tech decisions but "DOTS" is just a marketing device so Unity can make vague tech promises without getting into details. Its a blanket rebrand of several technologies Unity is currently pursuing.

ECS, the job system, the Burst compiler, large rewrites of several systems into C# from C++ (and more if you want to break out things like animation and physics rewrites) all fall under DOTS. These are all fine changes but they could all happen on their own. DOTS is not a technical term. Unity has just decided to wrap this all up into the more marketable DOTS name.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#85

Post by pjmlp »

vanderZwan wrote: post #70
learc83 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

It is.

There are several tutorials and Unite talks on Unity's YouTube channel.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#87

Post by bjconlan »

danShumway wrote: post #54

What's Godot's C# support like nowadays? I remember there being some criticism of the early implementation, but I haven't checked back recently. I keep on getting really curious about Godot, it seems like an engine that should be up my alley, and I really am in the market for Open Source engines. I don't want to keep coding everything myself. But I'm a little thrown off by the idea of learning a new scripting languag…

Yeah, I thought this too and was thrown off by learning a proprietary language but I found it didn't really get in the way both because of its familiarity and simplicity with talking to the event system and scene graph (as you would expect). Any shortcomings I found were clearly identified and documented. (Mind you this was a basic parallax game so was a shallow dive). It's really a hard thing to balance and can understand why c# would be choosen to perhaps deprecate this (but this choice I think is mostly from unity's success (and convertible user base)

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#88

Post by Sindisil »

lwb wrote: post #74
gdxhyrd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need reliable support, you have to pay someone. It does not matter which project you are talking about.

I'm not asking for support. Godot could definitely go the for-profit route and charge for cloud builds and other features like Unity does. I just want to make sure that if I invest in learning the tool as well as I know Unity that it'll be around for the next few years.

> that it'll be around for the next few years.

How is continuing development not "support"?

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#89

Post by learc83 »

jayd16 wrote: post #84
learc83 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unity is making some good tech decisions but "DOTS" is just a marketing device so Unity can make vague tech promises without getting into details. Its a blanket rebrand of several technologies Unity is currently pursuing. ECS, the job system, the Burst compiler, large rewrites of several systems into C# from C++ (and more if you want to break out things like animation and physics rewrites) all fall under DOTS. These…

>These are all fine changes but they could all happen on their own.

They really couldn't all happen on their own. They wanted to write more code in C#, so of course it makes sense that they'd start with the new systems they were making for the ECS. To support being able to write more in C# they developed the burst compiler. And the jobs system is a huge part of the way they developed their ECS system.

DOTS really just means Unity ECS plus a lot of other stuff that exists mostly to support ECS, and some stuff they've wanted to do for a while but it makes sense to add now since they are changing so much of the public API anyway. They brought Mike Acton in and "Data Oriented Technology Stack" is just all the stuff they needed/wanted to realize his goal of making things more performant/data oriented.

They were just calling all of their re-architecture ECS until a little while back, but it was kind of weird and ECS is already a severely overloaded term.

Would you be less upset if they called it "The re-architecture" instead of coming up with a convenient name for the new way of doing things?

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#90

Post by learc83 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #70
learc83 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Yeah Data Oriented Technology Stack.
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