Been meaning to pick up Godot one of these days, how does it fare on the wasm/webGPU front?
No WebGPU support yet in the engine
Godot 4 Beta 1
81–90 of 119 posts
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#82from the article, >>As much as we love exciting new features, we also want to see people create games on the full spectrum of devices for everyone to enjoy. This is one of the main attitudes of the Godot team I really appreciate a lot. It might be easy for people in more developed nations to upgrade their hardware every few years, but there's people still playing games running on computers from 2002 and before. I use…
> a computer he aimed a table fan at to keep it cool. The whole casing was open
That brings me back, I had to do the same to play Starcraft in the early 00s in summer since our house had no air conditioning and CPUs were passively cooled. I was drenched in sweat but I wasn't going to give up my games, dammit! The interesting thing is the symptom was just a crash to desktop, not a full system shutdown like now (for safety reasons I assume).
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#83from the article, >>As much as we love exciting new features, we also want to see people create games on the full spectrum of devices for everyone to enjoy. This is one of the main attitudes of the Godot team I really appreciate a lot. It might be easy for people in more developed nations to upgrade their hardware every few years, but there's people still playing games running on computers from 2002 and before. I use…
Optimization levels of many newer games are terrible. Low-poly, visually simplistic games like Fortnite, Risk of Rain 2, Valheim, and Deep Rock Galactic barely run on a friend's computer (that was made only 5 years ago). Visually more complex games like League of Legends run buttery smooth on the exact same hardware. (ironically, he says that Valorant, made by a non-Epic company, apparently runs significantly better…
The most common symptom I encounter on indie titles in particular is loading stutter. You can tell when something big is about to happen or you'll see a new enemy type because the game just locks up for a short but perceivable amount of time.
The 2nd Ori game was actually entirely unplayable on my system until I moved it to an SSD due to how it loads assets (don't know the details, but that's my assumption). I couldn't beat the time trials since it'd lock up mid-air due to the amount of map coverage and mess up my flow.
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#84from the article, >>As much as we love exciting new features, we also want to see people create games on the full spectrum of devices for everyone to enjoy. This is one of the main attitudes of the Godot team I really appreciate a lot. It might be easy for people in more developed nations to upgrade their hardware every few years, but there's people still playing games running on computers from 2002 and before. I use…
Optimization levels of many newer games are terrible. Low-poly, visually simplistic games like Fortnite, Risk of Rain 2, Valheim, and Deep Rock Galactic barely run on a friend's computer (that was made only 5 years ago). Visually more complex games like League of Legends run buttery smooth on the exact same hardware. (ironically, he says that Valorant, made by a non-Epic company, apparently runs significantly better…
There is a good talk from the authors of INSIDE that touches on how complicated the rendering pipeline can get for games that don’t look that “fancy” - “Low Fidelity, High Complexity” https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023002/Low-Complexity-High-Fi...
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah you can easily compartmentalize client/server with ifdefs but it's pretty hideous. Do serious shops on MP titles stick with UnrealNet? I find it performs poorly even with some of the bandaids like Replication Graph.
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 readin…
UE, especially on the networking side, always feels like the poor man's id Tech. Even stuff like QuakeC was miles ahead of Kismet.
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#86Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 readin…
UE, especially on the networking side, always feels like the poor man's id Tech. Even stuff like QuakeC was miles ahead of Kismet.
Yeah, everything about early id Tech is just, without exaggeration, decades ahead of Unreal. Of course, sex sells, so since Unreal renders fairly well, for this reason alone I think it attracts amateurs.
I think Godot wants to do the same thing, and I'm sure it'll work, but the authors are just like the rest of the open source community in that they don't actually work on features meaningful to most games.
Back to Unreal networking: what really sucks is that you can't easily just avoid using it by using your own networking subsystem. Because features like default actor movement are tightly bound to the RPC system, and concepts like network visibility are directly integrated with actors, you may unintentionally end up screwing up what needs to be networked to clients unless you very closely match what the existing networking code does.
It's sophisticated enough that I suspect there isn't a single company or individual who has done this, because that too would be far more effort than it might be worth.
It's so gross to me that you immediately cannot use things like the replication graph if you decide you want your game to support split screen. IIRC, that was a technical limitation for some reason. I could be misremembering. It's just disgusting.
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#88For the elf/linux target, I hope the build containers have a really, really old glibc (dunno which version it is) and the "-static-libgcc" and "-static-libstdc++" are defaults.
Honestly, given the state of linux games, hope they target musl
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, you’re better off having a single codebase with client/server/shared code and using either the equivalent of ifdefs or conditional blocks gating execution for these states. Unreal uses a different architecture where the codebase allows you to define who owns what, but it’s ultimately the exact same thing, and more confusingly done. Further, they have some actor states which are never actually used.…
Thanks! I think it makes sense, as a non-game programmer it felt "weird" so appreciate the confirmation from your angle.
I also was doing the same but ultimately put it down to wait for Godot 4 (and its niceties such as occlusion culling - I had performance issues with quake 1 maps loaded up through godot). Do you have a repo?
I had networking etc running fine with client/server architecture but I would like to see how others have achieved this.
Re: Godot 4 Beta 1
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even seemingly simple games are clocking in at 100GB+ in disk space. I think in terms of performance many games are setting the floor at the Nintendo Switch or the Steam Deck, often ripping out features to get it to run on those platforms (CIV6, 2k etc). This is one reason I really admired Valheim (~1GB). Though even that game had CPU issues (also its an indie title so...).
I'm aware of large AAA games taking up that much space (Doom Eternal, Red Dead Redemption 2) but they could hardly be considered "simple". Do you have examples of what you're talking about?
NBA2k is over 100GB. Sports games seem to do this a lot. It’s obviously due to the art assets that AAA roll out but there’s gotta be some way to trim the fat or at least do it incrementally.
“Simple” was probably a bad choice of words.