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Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

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Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#101

Post by pharke »

jayd16 wrote: post #36
1_player wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know Unity is under a bit of an upheaval right now with their engine architecture and it's putting a lot of strain on it's userbase. Care to elaborate?

They're moving from their existing Actor/Component model to a Entity/Component/System model. It might help them get some perf but its not as user friendly, nor trivial, so in Unity fashion they're just going to have several systems available is less than perfect interopt. They're also rewriting more things in C# but I think that's a pretty good change, personally.

Yikes, I didn't know that. I wish them luck but that is not a trivial change.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#102

Post by mntmoss »

learc83 wrote: post #89
jayd16 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

IMHO there is a basic error they're making, which is to do all of this in one product. When they have two internal architectures sharing one interface, the overall scope bloats up, which leads to some miserable UX.

With most game projects, the point is to ship them once and then start anew with the next one - long-term maintenance isn't the primary decision driver, and the games for which that is the case are rather exceptional and sit at the top end of the business - they can afford to keep around the staff dedicated engine work for the long run. The majority of users in contrast are equally as likely to welcome clean breaks as they are to despise them; as long as the previous engine has the proverbial lights kept on, there isn't an issue.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#103

Post by bufferoverflow »

vanderZwan wrote: post #3

I wonder if Godot has a chance of becoming the Blender of game engines. From the way it is growing it's starting to look like a real long-term possibility to me, especially for the smaller game studios.

It's hard to compete with Unity and Unreal, both of which are much more popular and feature rich.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#106

Post by kroltan »

brachi wrote: post #2

A very well written and inspiring post. I haven't used Godot much, but I feel 2020 and the next decade is going to continue growing much more :) > This was an extremely hard decision to make [work full time in Godot], because at the time, my experience (...) was paid a lot more, and I was receiving extremely good job offers(...). [T]he same happened to Rémi (an Energy Engineer), who also changed his life plans and pr…

In financial terms, we are sure that each are paid at least 4.4k USD/mo, based on their Patreon goals. If that is the right compensation is subjective, I'm not familiar with the market rates for that level of experience.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#107

Post by iamwil »

blondin wrote: post #76
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…

the real reason is that godot feels lightweight to devigners and they want to use it. there were tons of other html5/js game engines, some who have been there longer, but none have had support from mozilla!!

How come it feels lightweight? Would you be able to articulate it?

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#108

Post by forgotpwd16 »

ljm wrote: post #53
vanderZwan wrote: post #3

I wonder if Godot has a chance of becoming the Blender of game engines. From the way it is growing it's starting to look like a real long-term possibility to me, especially for the smaller game studios.

A real draw for me is working with C++ in it, since both Unity and Unreal appear to favour managed languages (C#, some JS variant, some weird Python style thing, etc.) No real reason for preferring C++ except I want to learn it, and my pet project is a little game rather than yet another web app/thing that renders DB records to HTML/thing that takes one JSON blob and turns it to another. I never did computer science…

Unreal has dropped their scripting language for a visual alternative called Blueprints. It is possible to make an entire game with it not writing any C++ and is possible to make one completely in C++. The best is of course using them together. And exactly the same applies to Godot. Just swap Blueprints for GDScript a Python-like scripting language. In a final note Unity, has dropped JavaScript. Though C++ can somehow be used, C# is indeed more or less Unity's language.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#109

Post by DonHopkins »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #108
ljm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A real draw for me is working with C++ in it, since both Unity and Unreal appear to favour managed languages (C#, some JS variant, some weird Python style thing, etc.) No real reason for preferring C++ except I want to learn it, and my pet project is a little game rather than yet another web app/thing that renders DB records to HTML/thing that takes one JSON blob and turns it to another. I never did computer science…

Unreal has dropped their scripting language for a visual alternative called Blueprints. It is possible to make an entire game with it not writing any C++ and is possible to make one completely in C++. The best is of course using them together. And exactly the same applies to Godot. Just swap Blueprints for GDScript a Python-like scripting language. In a final note Unity, has dropped JavaScript. Though C++ can somehow…

> In a final note Unity, has dropped JavaScript.

The thing that Unity dropped wasn't really JavaScript, and nobody in their right mind actually used it. It was called "UnityScript", and it was just a thin veneer over CLR that looked a bit like JavaScript, but exposed the CLR object model and C# APIs to arrays and dictionaries, etc, instead of supporting standard JavaScript APIs. The biggest problem was that most JavaScript libraries aren't compatible with UnityScript. Another big problem is that it wasn't as powerful, useful, and standard as C#. And yet another problem is that it wasn't an interactive language, so you couldn't load it at runtime, and had to run it through the compiler (which could take half an hour before you could see your changes).

https://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/UnityScript_versus_JavaSc...

>It is not uncommon for Unity developers and even members of Unity Technologies to refer to Unity's JavaScript like language as simply "JavaScript", as if it was equivalent or interchangeable with what most people know of as JavaScript on the web. However, the two are actually very different languages. Although they do resemble each other syntactically they have very different semantics. While "JavaScript" is merely a generic name and could refer to any one of many implementations of the ECMAScript specification, Unity's "JavaScript" language doesn't even come close to conforming to that specification — nor does it try to. It's a proprietary language and it doesn't actually follow any concrete specification of standard JavaScript and is modified at will by the engine developers.

>Because of this, the vast majority of JavaScript libraries you find will not work by default in Unity. Unity's "JavaScript" is most similar to Microsoft's JScript.NET, although it is not quite identical. Thus many developers prefer to call the language Unity uses "UnityScript" instead, to help differentiate it. Some people consider this to be "just semantics", but when people call both "JavaScript" it becomes a lot harder to search the internet for solutions and help related to Unity. It's also quite a lot of trouble to continuously specify whether one is referring to "real" JavaScript or Unity's version. So it's best to just stick with "JavaScript" for real JavaScript and "UnityScript" for Unity's language.

Unity also had a language called Boo that was to Python like UnityScript was to JavaScript, and nobody in their right mind used that either. UnityScript is actually a layer on top of Boo. Both UnityScript and Boo are obsolete and deprecated, fortunately, and nobody will miss them. Your time is MUCH better spend learning C# than UnityScript or Boo.

UnityScript’s long ride off into the sunset

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/08/11/unityscripts-long-ride-...

On the other hand, I've been developing UnityJS, which lets you program Unity3D in real honest-to-god JavaScript, download and debug code at runtime without recompiling your Unity app (which makes development astronomically faster), and use any standard JavaScript libraries and tools. And it works really well with the WebGL platform, for integrating Unity apps with web stuff, as well as on iOS and Android too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804242

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19748582

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744552

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745676

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18171571

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18860467

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#110

Post by allannienhuis »

kroltan wrote: post #106
brachi wrote: post #2

A very well written and inspiring post. I haven't used Godot much, but I feel 2020 and the next decade is going to continue growing much more :) > This was an extremely hard decision to make [work full time in Godot], because at the time, my experience (...) was paid a lot more, and I was receiving extremely good job offers(...). [T]he same happened to Rémi (an Energy Engineer), who also changed his life plans and pr…

In financial terms, we are sure that each are paid at least 4.4k USD/mo, based on their Patreon goals. If that is the right compensation is subjective, I'm not familiar with the market rates for that level of experience.

If they were receiving job offers with better compensation, that suggests that rate is below market, by definition :) .
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