Godot 4 Beta 1
godotengine.org
Godot 4 Beta 1
1–10 of 119 posts
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#2This is great.
I've been building my game on the Godot 4 alphas and the improvements in networking and rendering have more than made up for any instability or keeping up with changes. That said, more stability will be welcome and a focus on bug fixing instead of feature proposals will be key to a strong 4.0 release.
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#3HN hug of death? godotengine.org is offline for me at the moment. Regardless, really looking forward to trying it out! Here it is on the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220915181526/https://godotengi...
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#4Fantastic news. I'm really looking forward to Godot 4.0 exposing more of the ENet wrapper into GDScript etc. I've been writing a game server in Erlang and very much looking forward to offering ENet as an option in addition to WebSockets!
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#5I think writing their own physics engine might be wrong way to go here. I understand that Bullet leaves a lot to be desired, but my instinct is that the complexity from their own engine will leave a lot of edge case bugs that need to be ironed out over time, and that games using their own physics engine will suffer from a lot more quirks in the meantime.
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#6[deleted]
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#7I think writing their own physics engine might be wrong way to go here. I understand that Bullet leaves a lot to be desired, but my instinct is that the complexity from their own engine will leave a lot of edge case bugs that need to be ironed out over time, and that games using their own physics engine will suffer from a lot more quirks in the meantime.
A few years ago, as someone who has worked on physics engines for robotics simulations, I would have agreed with you. But now a lot of people are doing greenfield physics engines for games and having it work out pretty well. There's a ton of established academic and conference literature in the area now and it's not nearly as scary as it used to be.
For example, Horizon: Forbidden West uses a custom physics engine that started out as one of the core dev's fun side projects: https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics
Physics engines (at least game quality physics engines) are starting to drift in to "solved problem" territory and there's enough literature now that you can get something reasonable going yourself after doing some weekend reading.
Edit to add: Godot has had its own engine available for a long time, so it's not a totally new effort. It's a heavy refactor and a large improvement but the bones for this were laid years ago so some of that technical debt you're describing has already been paid down.
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#8I think writing their own physics engine might be wrong way to go here. I understand that Bullet leaves a lot to be desired, but my instinct is that the complexity from their own engine will leave a lot of edge case bugs that need to be ironed out over time, and that games using their own physics engine will suffer from a lot more quirks in the meantime.
I reckon they're thinking long term here though, if they don't change it now then likely the only time they could change it is when a theoretical Godot 5.0 comes out in who knows how many years.
It sounds like it's got bugs that need fixing either way, so at least for their own engine they're not reliant on anyone else to get those fixes out (or have to use hacky workarounds as would most likely be the actual fix).
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#9Impressive stuff. Starting to have the table stakes features that would need for a modern game.
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#10I think writing their own physics engine might be wrong way to go here. I understand that Bullet leaves a lot to be desired, but my instinct is that the complexity from their own engine will leave a lot of edge case bugs that need to be ironed out over time, and that games using their own physics engine will suffer from a lot more quirks in the meantime.
A few years ago, as someone who has worked on physics engines for robotics simulations, I would have agreed with you. But now a lot of people are doing greenfield physics engines for games and having it work out pretty well. There's a ton of established academic and conference literature in the area now and it's not nearly as scary as it used to be. For example, Horizon: Forbidden West uses a custom physics engine th…
I've briefly looked into physics engines and they seem to require a lot of trade-offs. If a rock meets a hard place, what should happen? Gamers have seen the hilarity that can ensue. Designing your own engine allows you to make those trade-offs with the end goal in mind. You can do things like set global force or speed limits, because you know your game's design and the appropriate limits.