Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

What got me started with Godot was the fact that it is completely open source, and I was evaluating also writing my project with Rust, and Godot had already support for interfacing it's scripting interface NativeScript even with Rust already (although much work in progress).

Ultimately I decided to develop the project with mostly C++, but during learning the engine I noticed that GDScript is very capable and seems even faster than Lua at least according to my 2 month experience, mostly coming probably from the fact that it has native types like vectors and matrixes and so on integrated directly into the scripting language and implemented with C++.

I was pleasantly surprised how easy and logical the engine is to use, they've made a lot of correct decicions when it comes to the technical viewpoint, for example getting engine scripts written with C++ was very easy, which surprised me.

The documentation is also very well written, with up-to-date examples and I haven't seen any missing information yet.

Only thing I've been missing is more complete examples of games utilizing C++ for example, and more complete projects to be looked at as an example. Most of the projects I could see were written mostly with GDScript, so I would have wished to see more indepth and professional examples in how to write performant projects using Godot.

But mostly GDScript even seems to enough to implement most of the game or application logic.

For me though, the fact that the engine is open source and that people are actively fixing issues in it, and I can even contribute myself is a big factor. The MIT license also grants me to do whatever I want with the end product, which is a big plus.

I hope to contribute to the project as I go along, been looking at the source code and it's really readable also, the architecture is pretty solid and clean at least according to my quick evaluation of the project.

I'm projecting great success for Godot in the next year, especially with the upcoming Oculus Quest support already well under way, this could be a easy and more flexible way for people to get into VR development possibly.

This was the only thing I could not easily find when trying to peruse the projects utilizing Godot online.

If they were to start from scratch, DOTS would be missing so much functionality that it wouldn't really be useful. By essentially using the strangler pattern, they are allowing people to get access to the newer architecture immediately, and then gradually adding more and more over time. Eventually, years from now, they will completely replace the old architecture. I'm sure there will be some version of what you're talking about here

>as long as the previous engine has the proverbial lights kept on

with the old architecture.

> 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

That's less the case these days with plenty of indie games produced by very small teams that are in early access release/development cycles for years. It's also very common to reuse existing codebases for new games.

>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.

The outcry over Unity abandoning the old way of doing things is pretty loud. Many people use Unity for multiple projects, and they get mad when Unity makes big changes that invalidate their knowledge, which is one reason Unity is making the changes so slowly.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/NestedPrefabs.html

You can't publish any code that calls non-standard APIs. So therefore any code that interacts with those APIs cannot be open source.

You would have to publish a seperate extension to the engine that is not open source and make it only available to those who have signed the Developer Licence Agreement for the platform. Depending on what licence you chose or how the code is structured that might break your own open source licence.