Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch • Hacker News Board

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#131

Post by bee_rider » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #73

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"only" If it's to dev a game with your kid, that pricey. Pricier than the console itself. Pricier than to dev for android or iphone, or any laptop. Or the steam deck for that matter. Expensive dev kits made sense for devs 20 years ago, but today they are just a way to lock the ecosystem.

Nintendo doesn't owe you a cheap way to deploy your custom binaries to devices. Buy a Steam Deck if you want that. Build it for Web GL or Android. Plenty of options exist. I'm not sure what OP actually wants here. Even if you can get your game running on your own Switch, it's not easy to get it up on the store.

What they actually want is a cheap way to develop games with their kid and possibly share them over sneakernet with her friends.

Nintendo obviously doesn’t owe them that, and it doesn’t seem to be supported. But, this is a good place to cast around for ideas.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#132

Post by runevault » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #17

Aissen wrote: post #14

It's interesting that they did not keep this a paid product, and use that as a lever: 1. to either get more customers 2. or to get Nintendo to remove the terms forbidding the open source release of software built on their platform I am guessing that 1. will happen anyway, and 2. isn't needed since they have found a middle ground with Nintendo hosting details on their developer portal.

The fact that Godot requires/required a third party studio to port your game to consoles is a major turnoff and one of the things preventing developers jumping on the Godot train. From a solo dev point of view, too scary and expensive; from an indie company's point of view it's an unwanted extra expense and a potential point of failure that you can't control. This opens things up considerably, despite the Nintendo wa…

No open source project can do it without third party support, the NDAs/etc required for getting access to the SDKs to build against those platforms prohibits it.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#133

Post by runevault » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

fwsgonzo wrote: post #2

Unsurprisingly, no plugins. Just plain-old GDScript, but embedding a faster scripting solution into the C++ codebase is not too hard for serious work.

I'll be curious if once the AOT c# hooks are added (hopefully with 4.3) if that will be able to work or not.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#134

Post by bee_rider » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #56

bjtitus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't anyone think of the giant multinational corporations instead of the kids learning to program for once.

No kid is going to learn how to program in Assembly and C++, when interfacing with a custom microkernel, custom graphics API, and all of the technical requirements Nintendo demands (i.e. you must have a launch screen, loading times cannot be longer than X, read speeds cannot peak higher than Y), while cross-compiling your game and all dependencies to ARM, and precompiling all shaders ahead of time, for the Tegra X1,…

It has around a 1Ghz cpu, you have no idea if their little homebrew games will stress that or need all the assembly tuning.

Kids have programmed games for their calculators. This is like “throw it together to show off your friends,” it doesn’t need to meet Nintendo’s UI standards.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#135

Post by bee_rider » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #74

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re kidding right? $450 for a dev kit is a steal compared to older console generations, which were thousands of dollars per device. Also, I think it is completely fair for Nintendo to think: If you won’t spare even $450 for a dev kit, there’s no way we want your game. By the way, consider what a Switch regularly costs: $299. You are paying Nintendo only $150 for the privilege of sending you a custom, low-run, modi…

you dont need any of that shite to run your own game on the Steam deck

> My 12 year old and I made a little game in Godot and it turned out pretty playable.

> I think in her peer group the second most popular device after the iPhone is the Switch. It would be incredibly cool if we could get our game to run there.

I don’t think buying her friends Steam Decks is a very scalable solution for this sort of thing.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#136

Post by Retr0id » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

weinzierl wrote: post #10

My 12 year old and I made a little game in Godot and it turned out pretty playable. I think in her peer group the second most popular device after the iPhone is the Switch. It would be incredibly cool if we could get our game to run there. I already found two GitHub repos with Godot ports, and this RAWRLAB announcement confirms that it will be doable on a technical level. However, I reckon that we do not qualify for…

I'd recommend canceling your Mig Switch order.

First and foremost, it financially supports some very sketchy players in the commercial piracy (under)world.

Secondly, it won't let you play homebrew games - only officially signed nintendo software.

Thirdly, you'll have to keep your console offline forever, if you plan to use it - you can bet Nintendo will start revoking cart certificates and banning consoles at the first opportunity (each genuine cartridge is uniquely identifiable).

We have completely free solutions to both """backups""" and homebrew. Your best bet is to find a cheap model with an unpatched bootrom, and your second best bet is to install an rp2040-based glitching modchip (or find someone to install it for you, if you're not comfortable with microsoldering).

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#137

Post by Retr0id » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 5:56 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #36

traverseda wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one of it's main uses is playing pirated nintendo switch games, which they're not going to advertise.

Sure, but I guess we all know what "backups" is code for. I just didn't realize they managed to bypass the protections for the Switch.

Law enforcement knows what backups is code for, too

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#138

Post by ChadNauseam » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 6:02 PM UTC

Ignorant question: I don't understand why this type of thing is necessary. IIUC there is nothing illegal about looking at leaked SDK docs and using emulators to contribute a Switch build target for Godot. Then game developers who want to develop Switch games could buy a devkit and build their games for switch, just like how I can build an APK for Android in Unity and load it onto my phone. Is the only thing stopping open source game engines from doing this a lack of time/funding/expertise/interest?

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#139

Post by prox » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 6:06 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #91

LarsDu88 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done game jams with both Godot and Unity. Mainly the plug-ins, particularly third party plug-ins for unity are better. One of them being cinemachine. Another example would be a tool call technique collider creator that let's you paint collider primitives. That tool alone saved about 300 hours of work. For many developers the Cinemachine tool is very useful as well. The other feature is the ability to edit game o…

This is exactly the feedback I was interested in...thanks! I think these kinds of criticisms are necessary for open source stuff to become competitive with proprietary offerings; it feels like Blender, for example, has taken these criticisms pretty seriously and as a result it's started to become competitive with proprietary tools (at least in the "prosumer" and lighter professional spaces). I'm sure they're already…

The Godot leads basically discussed this during the last conference that they are definitely not in the right zone to take over significant developer share for Unreal or Unity, they hope in new versions they can inch closer and closer.

Re: Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch

#140

Post by gs17 » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 6:07 PM UTC

tezza wrote: post #111

tombert wrote: post #78

I know "asymptotically close to zero" about game development and the like, so if someone who works in this space could answer this I'd be appreciative: what, if anything, would make you use Unity or Unreal instead of Godot for making a game today? This isn't meant as a passive aggressive question to push some kind of open source narrative, but a genuine curiosity. Since I know basically nothing about the industry, I'…

Unity so much more polished Unity has Timeline (and Cinemachine) Unity has Entity Component which is superior for many coders to Godot’s node system Unity has better 3D Unity has large bank of answered questions Unity exports to WebGL Unity Asset Store Assets are high quality, abundant and cost effective

>and Cinemachine

Phantom Camera does most of that in Godot.

>Unity exports to WebGL

Godot also does that, albeit without C# support until the next major version.