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

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

#181

Post by nomel » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

seanclayton wrote: post #179

nomel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it does have automatic LOD reduction Sure, Roblox does too, to some extent. Nanite allows all of this to be taken to the extreme, allowing you to do things that are practically impossible with other engines, including Godot. I think the next gen of games, that use Nanite, are going to stand out in a ridiculous way, which is often appealing for AA/AAA studios.

They'll stand out because they'll be 200GB+ on disk and you can only have one or two of them on your console and can't install any others.

I would say that pushing the limits of the hardware has been a constant of gaming, since pong.

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

#182

Post by pjlegato » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 7:32 PM UTC

singingboyo wrote: post #118

frompdx wrote: post #60

I really enjoy creating in Godot. However, I am far from a AA/AAA game dev. Godot is a great tool for creating games independently. Creating 2D tilemaps is significantly improved in Godot 4. For me, the most exciting thing to happen to Godot is the Steam Deck. The question of how to run Godot on the Nintendo Switch came up frequently on r/godot. There was no practical avenue for small time devs. I'm excited to see wh…

I think 2D tilemaps is a great example of how quickly Godot can fall over terribly, though. And that's (as has been mentioned elsewhere) mostly an issue of polish. Godot can do the basic version of a lot of things, but if you need more you often get very deep into the weeds, very quickly. With Godot 4, 2D tilemaps are incredibly awkward to use alongside random generation. You have (had?) to reset neighbor tiles yours…

Are the big commercial options such as Unreal and Unity significantly better when one attempts to do this sort of "off the beaten path" type stuff?

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

#183

Post by Karliss » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #103

light_hue_1 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

From what I have read Unity doesn't have an in-house physics engine, they use PhysX for 3d and Box2D for 2d .

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

#184

Post by manchmalscott » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 11:58 PM UTC

SXX wrote: post #161

Okay I'm little late to the party, but our company actually released commercial game on Steam and GOG. It called Dwarven Skykeep and it built in Godot. Now I'll list a few things that for some reason are not mentioned in article, but crucial for Godot success in commercial game development. 1. Official console support and partnership with platform owners. Yes this code will be closed source, but without this there ca…

I don't think the Godot foundation is what's meant to handle porting to consoles and integrating with closed source libraries. You're probably thinking of W4 Games, started by the Godot founders:

https://w4games.com/

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

#185

Post by bufferoverflow » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:55 AM UTC

seanclayton wrote: post #179

nomel wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it does have automatic LOD reduction Sure, Roblox does too, to some extent. Nanite allows all of this to be taken to the extreme, allowing you to do things that are practically impossible with other engines, including Godot. I think the next gen of games, that use Nanite, are going to stand out in a ridiculous way, which is often appealing for AA/AAA studios.

They'll stand out because they'll be 200GB+ on disk and you can only have one or two of them on your console and can't install any others.

Who cares? Storage is cheap and is getting cheaper. Huge games are inevitable. (unless we come up with some sort of an AI that generates all the objects and textures close enough to the real ones)

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

#186

Post by m4nu3l » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 4:16 PM UTC

I have been using Godot since it was open-sourced in 2014. I'm also familiar with the source code and I have made some contribution. I mostly created prototypes until two years ago when I started working my first commercial project, it's called Outer Space: War Gears and it's a six-degrees-of freedom space shooter.

I chose Godot mostly because of the familiarity and hackability. However I spent a lot (too much) time working around/fixing obscure bugs in the engine. I figured I was definitely the first one to use some features (given they really didn't work), like using GDNative in a MT fashion.

Another issue (for Godot 3.x, Godot 4 is much better in this regard) is that GDScript is really slow. I got to a point where it took longer to run all the script than to run the physics step (and my game is physics-based, all actors are rigid bodies!). Luckily GDScript is fully parallelizable as it doesn't have a GIL. So now I run a lot of code in thread pools and do a lot of sub-step optimizations. If you do use it with MT, though, you won't be able to debug GDScript and profile on any other thread than the main one - for better profiling I just use perf.

However I'm reluctant to use Unity and UE because even just loading the project in the editor is much faster in Godot. I like it being so lightweight. I also like how you can easily write native modules for it. Recompiling the Engine is quite fast.

I hope Godot 4, with more support from companies and the community will get much better.

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

#187

Post by krapp » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 1:46 PM UTC

m4nu3l wrote: post #186

I have been using Godot since it was open-sourced in 2014. I'm also familiar with the source code and I have made some contribution. I mostly created prototypes until two years ago when I started working my first commercial project, it's called Outer Space: War Gears and it's a six-degrees-of freedom space shooter. I chose Godot mostly because of the familiarity and hackability. However I spent a lot (too much) time…

At the very least, language support should be better thanks to GDExtension.

I'm not a fan of GDScript either and C# is too heavy for my tastes, so I'm waiting to see which alternate language implementation matures enough for someone to actually publish a game with it.