Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing? • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by remram » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

throwawayben wrote: post #52

seanw444 wrote: post #39

Does anyone know where the Godot 4.0 source is? I don't see any branches or tags for it on the main repo on GitHub. I've only seen the pre-compiled dev snapshots. It would seem weird for them to develop an open-source project behind closed doors. I must just be blind?

I believe it's being developed on the master branch at https://github.com/godotengine/godot

It is weird that the numerous alpha/beta releases [1] are not getting tagged though.

[1] https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-0-beta-...

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

#102

Post by karpierz » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

logicprog wrote: post #73

avx56 wrote: 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 existi…

Is there a set of libraries you'd recommend in this vein?

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

#103

Post by gamblor956 » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:42 PM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #92

gamblor956 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It doesn't help that they just dropped the Bullet physics engine because it was "too hard" to implement If it's "too hard" for Unreal, why wouldn't it be too hard for Godot? I think this is really an unfair criticism when you look at other game engines. Unreal had Bullet support in version 3 and dumped it. And they had PhysX in version 4 and dumped it in 5. > now promise to make an "engine agnostic" interface for p…

The difference is that you can, and could, make fully functional physics-based games in Unity and Unreal because their in-house engines were accurate and performant enough. The point of integrating Bullet/physX was to provide the option for even more accurate physics engines.

Godot's in-house engine is neither performant, nor accurate, and it boggles the mind to think that having abandoned the relatively easy task of implementing a single physics engine written in the same language as their game engine (and that their competitors were able to integrate and support) that they would be able to accomplish the far more difficult task of implementing an engine-agnostic interface supporting multiple physics engines, as accomplishing the latter would require them to first accomplish the former...

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

#104

Post by avx56 » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:46 PM UTC

logicprog wrote: post #73

avx56 wrote: 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 existi…

I find this hard because games often end up quite tightly-coupled, so while you don't have the pathfinding code reaching into the rendering, the rendering is usually coupled to the game object model and it's hard to make it reusable outside of a specific engine. That and the fact that AAA studios do not want to open-source anything for some reason.

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

#105

Post by Jensson » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:48 PM UTC

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #20

Do you prefer Godot or Unity for 2D games these days? I did a simple game in Unity and it went pretty well. I'd prefer to use C# if possible. Unity is a very nice environment but IIRC it really seems to chug when reloading user scripts from disk after updates.

You can make unity much faster by disabling "version control" in the package manager, you don't need it but it makes code reload time much much longer.

Another huge thing to make things faster is to check the "enable playmode run settings" box and ensure that you don't reload the entire code base every time you press the play button. If a "waiting" box pops up every time you press play then the settings aren't right, you can remove that so entering and exiting play happens instantly.

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

#106

Post by EamonnMR » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

I love Godot to pieces, have used it for several games and will continue to do so. Here's what's missing:

* Sane animation import toolchain. The current one from blender is enormously finicky.

* Good enough pathfinding (supposed to be fixed in GD4)

* Better native map support (heighmap or some sort of interior)

* Fix the 2d tileset editor, doing anything interesting in it is way too labor intensive because it lacks copy paste for tile parameters. A better system would let you set up a small number of tile templates and just map tiles to templates to quickly rig up huge tilesets.

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

#107

Post by therein » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:55 PM UTC

lazypenguin wrote: post #9

Godot is a nice engine. I did a 3D project in it during the 3.0.x era and it was by far the friendliest and easiest engine I have used to-date. I think it gets a lot of love from people (myself included) because of that. The node system is absolutely wonderful to work with and GDScript is not bad as well. It's the most productive I've been in a game engine and I regularly contemplate going all-in on Godot for the fut…

Tangentially to your post, but nonetheless interesting:

"jack of all trades master of none" is the shorthand version of the full phrase "A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one” which has been used since 1721.

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

#108

Post by demindiro » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

lazypenguin wrote: post #9

Godot is a nice engine. I did a 3D project in it during the 3.0.x era and it was by far the friendliest and easiest engine I have used to-date. I think it gets a lot of love from people (myself included) because of that. The node system is absolutely wonderful to work with and GDScript is not bad as well. It's the most productive I've been in a game engine and I regularly contemplate going all-in on Godot for the fut…

> Maybe it's unfair of me, the retort is always "it's open source, contribute back!" but alas that is how I felt as a USER before I considered being a CONTRIBUTOR.

Even as a contributor I've found it very frustrating to contribute to Godot.

I've found lots and lots of bugs while working on my own projects using Godot. I spent a lot of time digging in the engine code to figure out the cause, make an issue and a patch if I could.

However, even small changes take a lot of time and effort. While I used Godot 3 for my own projects most of the PRs had to be based against 4. At the time Godot 4 was in a very sorry state and I ran in many, many issues that made it hard to test if the same fix for Godot 3 also works in Godot 4.

I wrote some libraries to work around issues that I (or others) could not get fixed or reverted (e.g. I replaced the physics engine with Rapier3D because I really needed more stable and working joints) but I eventually threw in the towel and decided to focus on other hobbies.

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

#109

Post by jarsin » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

Does godot have multiplayer options?

I know Unity abandoned their old networking and is working on a new one, but at least there are open source options like mirror, and paid options like photon fusion.

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

#110

Post by FireInsight » Mon, Jan 16, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

lazypenguin wrote: post #9

Godot is a nice engine. I did a 3D project in it during the 3.0.x era and it was by far the friendliest and easiest engine I have used to-date. I think it gets a lot of love from people (myself included) because of that. The node system is absolutely wonderful to work with and GDScript is not bad as well. It's the most productive I've been in a game engine and I regularly contemplate going all-in on Godot for the fut…

Godot nowadays is getting to "Master" levels of 2D IMO.