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Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

godotengine.org

71–80 of 187 posts

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#71
post #59

I don't make a lot of "games", but I do make a lot of tools these days (native OS GUI/console-cli etc.). And I feel like Godot wouldn't really be a good fit for such things, or am I wrong?

IIRC Godot is made in Godot, so if you're looking to build a tool like Godot, it's a good fit. For a CLI application? Not so much.

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#72
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the issues with open source, polishing isn't "fun", where massive rewrites to a new thing are.

I don't know about fun, but structurally, polish is one of the hardest things to contribute to an open source project. Polishing usually has a very large "activation energy", where the overhead of synchronizing, making a PR, building consensus, etc. dwarfs the actual effort in the patch. Polishing may involve hundred or thousands of small changes like this. Outsiders are likely to prefer contributing large features w…

On top of that, polish usually involves some amount of opinionated design, which can be hard to contribute to an open source project - you’ll break someone else’s workflow, or maybe it doesn’t mesh with the ideas of a core maintainer, etc.

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#73
post #28

Godot felt frustrating to use every time I've tried it, on both 4.x and 3.x versions. Compared to Unity, it was a massive improvement, the editor was much faster without crashing, and it had a reasonable node-graph design. However, I think some of the "elegant" designs pursued in Godot and some up-and-coming Rust game engines often end up feeling very time-consuming to fit your code in their abstraction (whether it b…

This is why I prefer using libraries to abstract away the complicated parts of doing low level graphics, sound, etc over game engines/frameworks. Engines call me, instead of being called BY me, and that forces me to use their whole environment instead of picking just what I need, as well as forcing me to distort the concepts and abstractions that are most natural for how I think about a problem to fit into the existing way they want things to work. I prefer being able to make my own architectural decisions.

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#74

Would Godot be a decent engine for kids around 12-14 years old? I don't know a lot about it, but would like to suggest something for a person I know. I'd also be curious what the Godot support is like in terms of maintaining older releases. I think it would be a mistake to tell a young person to use a beta version since they could hit a lot of bugs and get discouraged, but having them use an existing version that doe…

GameMaker is pretty much the best game engine to get introduced to programming. It has a visual scripting tool that lets you write basic logic without any raw textual coding, but also provides a smooth transition path to learn an actual scripting language (GML) when the child becomes more ambitious. I’ve started programming at a young age thanks to this. (Godot had a visual scripting system but they removed it in 4.0…

That looks pretty good. Thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#75
I've been using Godot off and on for the past month prototyping a mobile game. The editor loads/refreshes very quickly on a macbook air m1 (which hasn't been the case w/ Unity of late). The workflow is intuitive and for reasonably scoped games, it's a great fit.

I was surprised to not feel limited by gdscript (having no python background and doing most work in JS for the past decade). I picked it up quickly and it's well documented and integrated into vscode.

Not sure if it would be my choice for a large game with millions of entities (e.g. an online RPG that needs an ECS system) but for small 2d games it is a delight to work with.

I may be the minority here, but I hope Godot doesn't try to cater to AA/AAA devs and keeps small indies front and center as the focus.

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#76
post #28

Godot felt frustrating to use every time I've tried it, on both 4.x and 3.x versions. Compared to Unity, it was a massive improvement, the editor was much faster without crashing, and it had a reasonable node-graph design. However, I think some of the "elegant" designs pursued in Godot and some up-and-coming Rust game engines often end up feeling very time-consuming to fit your code in their abstraction (whether it b…

I get where you're coming from, and there is always a certain hackiness to game code it seems.

But I've embraced godot for 2D games and it has been wonderful. I get more code reuse out of the node system than I ever got out of class hierarchies elsewhere. I find myself with the time to set up a lot more test scenarios where I can play two things side by side to find the better feel -- rather than just getting one to work at all.

Yes, that's all subjective and might just be me getting better at game development, but I was immediately productive in Godot, and I haven't run into a roadblock for what I happen to be doing. I imagine there may be a game type, or otherwise simple technique that is nearly impossible in godot, but simple elsewhere; that's true of every game engine it seems.

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#77
post #55
post #2

> After an unsatisfactory attempt at using Bullet, Godot 4.0 returns to its own physics engine which, despite not being a high end physics engine like PhysX, aims to offer a lot more flexibility and “just works” capabilities to users. This is a bit of a red flag if one of their goals is for the engine to be used on AAA games.

Why? What commercial game is physics-heavy? Most commercial games have scripted character movement (every FPS, RPG, strategy games, basically almost every genre) and the only physics objects are random falling objects that don't affect gameplay... Cloth simulation, cool but can be faked and doesn't affect gameplay. Ragdolls, only really used when characters die and again, can be faked. So name a single AAA game that…

Fortnite, GTA, RDR, apex, PUBG? I mean, scripted games are way less popular than they used to be. And I actually can't think of more than a couple major games without some sort of physics.

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#78
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the issues with open source, polishing isn't "fun", where massive rewrites to a new thing are.

I don't understand why there hasn't been a widely successful crowd financing platform for open source yet. I imagine it has to be a bit complex but it sounds like a solvable problem.

Patreon exists, but I hesitate to contribute to projects/people through Patreon as I want to give them as little money as possible...

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#79
post #67

What's missing and not in the article is a showcase game, a proof that this engine can deliver a real AA/AAA on the market.

Godot's showcase game was supposed to be the poorly-reviewed remaster of Sonic Colors Ultimate that came out 2 years ago. Unfortunately, the remaster was extremely buggy to the point of being unplayable on a PC.

And Godot has pretty much been DOA for AA/AAA development since then.

It doesn't help that they just dropped the Bullet physics engine because it was "too hard" to implement and now promise to make an "engine agnostic" interface for physics engines, which is significantly more more work than just figuring out how to implement a single physics engine (and extending that implementation to be engine agnostic).

Godot is the anti-Blender; it's perpetually 70% of the way "there" but they are always abandoning that last 30% because it's too hard, or too boring, to finish.

(For comparison, at this point in its lifecycle, i.e., 9 years old, Unity was well-polished and had already been the choice for indie and mobile game development for several years. In the past week alone, multiple one-developer games made in Unity have made it to the front page of HN.)

Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?

#80
post #69
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's missing? It's got rotating (MMB), panning (Shift + MMB), zoom (scrollwheel) and focus on object (F).

Zoom is limited. It's not infinite zoom. How do I move through the level in Z direction? I saw a video mention WASD keys but it didn't work for me. In unreal you can fly through the level using mouse and keyboard. WASD is cardinal direction and mouse is camera rotation. In godot mouse wheel zooms the camera, but I couldn't find a way to 'move' the camera in Z.

As most people working on these are probably aware, this is very easy to implement in a 3d engine using a quaternion orientation that rotates the WASD vectors, updating position and view orientation accordingly. Can do it with FPS friendly things like WASD + Q and E for roll, and space and C for up/dn.

And blockers on patching this into the editor?

Context: I have a very basic engine written in Rust/WGPU. Mainly using for chemistry sims. This is its default nav system.

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