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It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

jolexxa.medium.com

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Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#11

Post by okwubodu »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #2

> It’s no secret that Unity is painful to use: it’s slow to open, and it often pauses to re-scan the entire project while you’re trying to work Is this actually true? I always figured Unity's selling point was being lighter and easier to use than unreal. Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.

Personally, I think they were a bit generous there.

I’m not sure what it is but it’s gotten significantly worse over the past few years and I’ve stopped recommending it to new game devs.

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#12

Post by TillE »

johnfn wrote: post #6
pipeline_peak wrote: post #2

> It’s no secret that Unity is painful to use: it’s slow to open, and it often pauses to re-scan the entire project while you’re trying to work Is this actually true? I always figured Unity's selling point was being lighter and easier to use than unreal. Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.

The quoted statement is 100% accurate. Unity is very slow. When I worked on Unity with a larger project, I'd often have to wait 10+ seconds for Unity to rescan the entire project every time I switched windows from my IDE to Unity, or every time I ran the project. In similar project sizes, Godot was always lightning fast. > Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product…

> the central abstractions are much better thought out

Totally agree. Godot is the first engine I've ever used where I don't feel like I'm fighting with it the whole time to make it do what I want.

Godot is pretty clearly a solid choice for anyone making 2D games, and will eventually be a fantastic choice once we get a stable Godot 4.0 with .NET 6 and other nice features.

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#13

Post by scottymac »

Entinel wrote: post #5
pipeline_peak wrote: post #2

> It’s no secret that Unity is painful to use: it’s slow to open, and it often pauses to re-scan the entire project while you’re trying to work Is this actually true? I always figured Unity's selling point was being lighter and easier to use than unreal. Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.

Anyone who used Unity 2.x in 08 would tell you Godot is far beyond where Unity was in 2008 in terms of features and stability.

Especially for 2D features.

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#14

Post by sfteus »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #10

C# hasn't been an issue for me at all bar a few oddities. Some things not working properly in C# (think some plugins or something back a while ago). Some code not directly mapping from GDScript to C#, causing huge object count issues. For reference, I've been using it since 3.1 in a hobby context. Really, it's not the developers you have to worry about. It's everyone else. Godot is made with developers in mind, but t…

> If you can't map things one to one from a different program or close to that through a plugin

I've only used Godot in a hobby context, but the full on C# support compared to other engines is pretty amazing. Just as a proof of concept I imported an open source C# library I've worked on that's designed to play old DOS music formats, created a small wrapper node with control functions, and I was able to control it as expected from within GDScript nodes right out of the box. Only issue I would have seen down the road would be cross-platform compatibility since the library itself was Windows only.

Caveat: I can't say I've ever got far enough in Unity to say if the C# support is of a similar scope. Godot just "clicks" better for me, so I've gotten way farther with it than anything I've done in Unity.

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#15

Post by Dracophoenix »

johnfn wrote: post #6
pipeline_peak wrote: post #2

> It’s no secret that Unity is painful to use: it’s slow to open, and it often pauses to re-scan the entire project while you’re trying to work Is this actually true? I always figured Unity's selling point was being lighter and easier to use than unreal. Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.

The quoted statement is 100% accurate. Unity is very slow. When I worked on Unity with a larger project, I'd often have to wait 10+ seconds for Unity to rescan the entire project every time I switched windows from my IDE to Unity, or every time I ran the project. In similar project sizes, Godot was always lightning fast. > Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product…

Would you still recommend Unity for 3D iOS game development, or would it be better to move on to Godot?

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#16

Post by jolexxa »

disintegore wrote: post #4

> One is an industry behemoth and the world’s most popular game engine, while the other is a free, 30 megabyte program developed by passionate developers in their free time. I was under the impression that Godot had at least two full-time devs working on it. Between their patreon revenue and the grants they've received they can definitely afford a small team on payroll. It's still important to stress the comparison i…

That's a good point, I can edit that for clarity in the article (especially since I mentioned Godot's Patreon support later in the article). I was assuming that the Patreon support didn't amount to full time support for all the devs that contribute, but I don't know if that's true or not.

Either way, it seems a lot of people have contributed without sponsorship, but the main devs are (hopefully) compensated.

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#17

Post by bluefirebrand »

Zhyl wrote: post #3

With 4.0 getting more and more advanced features [0] and Unity merging with an Ad company [1], Godot is looking like it could be an attractive proposition for a lot of Unity shops. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32003065 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051

It's definitely Godot's opportunity to drive a lot of adoption, I'm seeing a ton of disgust from a lot of indie devs I follow, and looking for alternatives to Unity now.

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#18

Post by bluefirebrand »

johnfn wrote: post #6
pipeline_peak wrote: post #2

> It’s no secret that Unity is painful to use: it’s slow to open, and it often pauses to re-scan the entire project while you’re trying to work Is this actually true? I always figured Unity's selling point was being lighter and easier to use than unreal. Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.

The quoted statement is 100% accurate. Unity is very slow. When I worked on Unity with a larger project, I'd often have to wait 10+ seconds for Unity to rescan the entire project every time I switched windows from my IDE to Unity, or every time I ran the project. In similar project sizes, Godot was always lightning fast. > Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product…

I love working with Godot but I can't help but feel like GDScript is a mistake.

I want better language support and community when working on a project. I want to use nice VSCode plugins that auto format my code (and give type hints... Untyped languages hurt me so much these days)

I can't wait for better C# integration for Godot. It's ok now but I'd love it to be rock solid.

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#19

Post by kevingadd »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #18
johnfn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quoted statement is 100% accurate. Unity is very slow. When I worked on Unity with a larger project, I'd often have to wait 10+ seconds for Unity to rescan the entire project every time I switched windows from my IDE to Unity, or every time I ran the project. In similar project sizes, Godot was always lightning fast. > Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product…

I love working with Godot but I can't help but feel like GDScript is a mistake. I want better language support and community when working on a project. I want to use nice VSCode plugins that auto format my code (and give type hints... Untyped languages hurt me so much these days) I can't wait for better C# integration for Godot. It's ok now but I'd love it to be rock solid.

Custom scripting language seems to be a common error - early on Unity emphasized a pseudo-custom scripting language (Boo) over C# and had to slowly extract it out of the product, documentation etc.

It makes sense as a risk management strategy early on in engine development, though, since integrating something like C# can be difficult and they may have been afraid that they would regret building around C# later on.

Re: It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot

#20

Post by johnfn »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #15
johnfn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quoted statement is 100% accurate. Unity is very slow. When I worked on Unity with a larger project, I'd often have to wait 10+ seconds for Unity to rescan the entire project every time I switched windows from my IDE to Unity, or every time I ran the project. In similar project sizes, Godot was always lightning fast. > Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product…

Would you still recommend Unity for 3D iOS game development, or would it be better to move on to Godot?

Hmm, it depends how much you're going to be using the 3D features that Unity provides. If you're going down the big list of Unity 3D features and you're thinking you need a whole bunch of them, then it's possible that Unity would be a time save in the long run. But honestly I like Godot so much that it would take a lot to tip the scales.

I would personally not use Unity at all because I find the developer experience so frustrating. I'd rather spend an extra couple of days enjoyably hacking something together rather than spending less time in more frustrating ways (like waiting for compiles). But I feel I'm more sensitive to these things than most people.

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