Godot is increasingly becoming really interesting to me. It seems to be working its way towards the engine for developers who design (as opposed to other engines which seem to be for designers who develop).
What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
81–90 of 112 posts
Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#82It’s surprising to me that javascript wasn’t chosen as the scripting language for all these gaming engines. Though I do see the benefit of C# being typed and compiled.
Everyone who uses javascript has to write it in a superset language that has sane types, a (poorly implemented) standard library, and other features javascript lacks, and treat it like a batch of volatile chemicals because outside of its specific niche of scripting the DOM, javascript is a terrible, unstable language at best adequate for purpose, a necessary evil because the web doesn't support anything else (barring…
> so why not use a better language to start with?
Perhaps consider that for many programmers, TypeScript is JavaScript, and TypeScript is that better language. I've put a decent amount of thought into using TypeScript for games because it allows for a flexible, expressive data model in a way that few other languages do. The performance might be a problem for some flavors of games, but I'm interested in discrete simulations almost exclusively, where it doesn't matter at all. But TypeScript allows effectively encoding intent into data structures and into code in a really ergonomic and pleasant way, while also running on virtually every gaming platform on the planet.
(Rust, etc. are fine. If that's your bag, that's great. I'll write Rust if I need to, but I don't enjoy it, and don't seek out opportunities to write it.)
Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#83Any godot programmers here. How is godot's support of games in the browser? 4 years ago I was deciding on a game engine to use. I considered it to unreal, Unity, and godot. I want to be able to build games that can be played on the web. I have many fond memories of the Flash game days. Distributing games over the web allows me to share games with people without the friction of installers, or App Store gate keepers, w…
We made https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io in godot 3.5. ~ 20MB wasm binary, ~20MB game assets. We did however, have to do a ** ton of engine modifications to get the performance characteristics we needed on web, so mileage may vary depending on what you are actually building. But overall, 3.5 supports web very well. 4.0 is too unstable for us to use it yet, so jury still out on that one.
But the absolute, most amazing thing ( coming from the anxiety of app 'submissions', going through 'reviews', etc ), is the ability to update/fix/hotpatch everything instantly. Like within seconds. We have a simple CI/CD workflow that builds, updates & deploys a new godot site ( with dedicated gameserver backends) within seconds. The ability to just do this however you want, whenever you want, without going through some kind of platform distribution interface is great. With the exception of WGSL being such a dumpster fire of a spec, I'm pretty bullish on web for gamedev & distribution. There's some really great stuff being built right now, see: wasm+webtransport+wgpu
Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#84Any godot programmers here. How is godot's support of games in the browser? 4 years ago I was deciding on a game engine to use. I considered it to unreal, Unity, and godot. I want to be able to build games that can be played on the web. I have many fond memories of the Flash game days. Distributing games over the web allows me to share games with people without the friction of installers, or App Store gate keepers, w…
Does anyone actually play games in the browser? I mean, there is no technical reason not to, but I kinda find it strange.
Lots of indies like to make their games available and easily playable (e.g. no download) during development on itch so for that use case, yes, it's important.
Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
They use their own heavily optimized Mono runtime that is .Net Standard 2.1 compliant and supports all C# 8 and many C# 9 features. As a C#/.Net developer I'm satisfied with the C# and .Net support in Unity. The pain points are elsewhere. https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/dotnetProfileSupport.html https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CSharpCompiler.html
As a developer on one of larger Unity games - yes, there are paint points elsewhere. There are many pain points. The poor performance of Mono/IL2CPP is a significant one for us. We have a different game built on .NET (Core) and performance is significantly better. I also wouldn't call Unity's Mono 'heavily optimized' because they definitely trail behind standard Mono. Unity doesn't even support Mono's generational ga…
Out of curiosity what engine are you using that leverages .NET (core) ? Stride?
Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#86It’s surprising to me that javascript wasn’t chosen as the scripting language for all these gaming engines. Though I do see the benefit of C# being typed and compiled.
It's mostly a historical accident, like Python ending up as the data science language. Microsoft XNA used to be a popular indie game framework that used C#. Stardew Valley, Celeste and Terraria run on XNA. Mono used C#. Xamarin used Mono to create a cross-platform application framework that worked on mobile. Unity leveraged Xamarin to create a cross-platform game engine that worked on mobile, ending up using C#. Thus…
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Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use mono for targets that need it and .NET 6 for those that don't
Keeping two implementations side by side would be expensive to maintain and not a good user experience: you start writing nice, "modern" .NET6 code and then need to rewrite things to run on top of .NET4-ish (and the older BCL and C#). And I think .NET6 supports mobile now?
Yet Godot manages it, with a volunteer team and a better overall user experience.
Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really surprising. JavaScript-the-language is missing lots of features that could be useful, like operator overloading. Or any overloading, really. Nothing is stopping you from compiling JavaScript though, browsers do it. The lack of static types makes this harder, of course.
Suppose you could use typescript and compile that?
Yes and no. Yes that's possible but no, this is no longer (full) TypeScript. Check AssemblyScript on that topic, it's TS to WASM. Most of the dynamic code stuff isn’t allowed and, of course, there’s a different standard library underneath.
Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#89Any godot programmers here. How is godot's support of games in the browser? 4 years ago I was deciding on a game engine to use. I considered it to unreal, Unity, and godot. I want to be able to build games that can be played on the web. I have many fond memories of the Flash game days. Distributing games over the web allows me to share games with people without the friction of installers, or App Store gate keepers, w…
We made https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io in godot 3.5. ~ 20MB wasm binary, ~20MB game assets. We did however, have to do a ** ton of engine modifications to get the performance characteristics we needed on web, so mileage may vary depending on what you are actually building. But overall, 3.5 supports web very well. 4.0 is too unstable for us to use it yet, so jury still out on that one. But the absolute, most a…
I want to say I'm a big fan of this game, simple and really fun! Good job!
Re: What's new in C# for Godot 4.0
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry if my question was worded badly. Obviously, some people are playing games in the browser - perhaps I should have asked more specifically what the appeal is, e.g. is it mostly small casual games like what Flash used to be used for, or do people actually play more invested games? And sorry again if the answer to these questions is so obvious to some of you that the question itself sounds dumb, but I'm simply not…
Running games in the browser provides a bit of convenience of not having to download and run a platform-specific executable. There might be some security benefits too. Depends on the nature of the game though. It works best for games that are lightweight and stateless.
Sure, this was clear to me too. My question was not so much about the advantages of browser games but rather if they actually have a market.
And speaking of that: what are the main monetization schemes? Are browser games sold like other games? Or are they mostly ad-based like other web content?