Godot 4 Beta 1

I'm very excited for Godot 4 beta.

I shipped games on Godot 3 and the idea of having Vulkan and better culling is really attractive.

When I tried the alpha fairly early on the editor was completely unusable on macOS.

Unreal's default multiplayer architecture is unreliable by design and Tim Sweeney's whitepaper on its design from 1999, IIRC, talks about it in plain language. It's dramatically different than the Quake family of engines which reliably replicates entity states. The fact that he does not think of clients as being capable of having accurate replicable state is jaw dropping and appalling to read. It's, well, like reading a dissertation of provably wrong statements.

Serious shops hack around the fact that Unreal uses a variable timestep. Because it uses a variable timestep and uses an RPC design that does not align state changes with frametimes, you, by definition, cannot make say, a reliable first-person shooter. Every game that uses Unreal must use cone projection and proximity hacks on top of the RPC system to attempt to make a reliable first person shooter, because you cannot guarantee the state of actor positions and inputs coming from the same frame of execution.

Beautiful game engine though. Absolutely unreliable, though.

If you ever wondered why FPS games on modern versions of the Unreal Engine had multiplayer that felt so bad, it's because the engine isn't designed from the ground up to be accurately replicated to clients.

The design issue is systemic, so it may never be fixed, and Unreal engineers have decided it's too difficult or laborious to tackle.

I think the main difference is that GDNative only had access to Godot's scripting API, so it could only manipulate the same stuff that GDScript or C# already could. So in 3.x, if you wanted to manipulate engine internals, you had to "engine extensions" which had to be compiled with the engine itself. But with GDExtension I think you're supposed to be able to do _everything_ that "engine extensions" could do, but without having to re-compile Godot itself.

This logic doesn't hold up.

> Memory tends to play tricks and we remember older games looking better than they actually did

We compared what League of Legends, Valorant, and Inscryption look like now with what those other games look like now. There's no rose-tinted glasses involved - this is an apples-to-apples comparison.

> Those games you've mention run on advanced and heavyweight fragment and vertex shaders to create a specific look

If that same look is being created in a far more performant manner by other games, then that means that the game is poorly optimized.

> cartoony graphics in Fortnite

Same effect class as Valorant and League, with lower visual fidelity, and worse performance.

> there's a million effects on screen a dozen levels in a Risk of Rain game

Risk of Rain is incredibly laggy in the menu, with zero mobs on screen and a single small scene as the background.

> yet everything else is 20 years ahead of that game tech and complexity wise

Again, see Valorant, LoL, and Inscryption.

> Also not sure what your friend's PC is like, because a 5 year old PC can play all of those games with ease, though perhaps not at max settings.

Core i3-5015U with Intel integrated 5500[1] - so, 7 years old. Yet, it can still run League and Valorant at >60 fps with default settings, and 20-30fps Inscryption and Dota 2 with reduced settings - meanwhile, Fortnite, DRG, RoR2, and Valheim are all slideshows with all settings turned all the way down.

The claim that "these new games are just so much more involved than older games" simply doesn't hold up against the reality that there are recently-released games that look better and perform better simultaneously than these examples.

My lived experience, my understanding of computer graphics, and knowledge of things like the GTA Online incident[2] strongly indicates that this line of reasoning is incorrect.

[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/84698/i...

[2] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

Core i3-5015U with Intel integrated 5500.

Yes, that's a low-end processor. No, it doesn't matter, because the fact is that there are several other games that look better and run much better on the same hardware.