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Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

godotengine.org

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Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#51

Post by dleslie »

vanderZwan wrote: post #47
MattRix wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a Godot user, I'm a Unity user, but the fact that you don't have to pay is one of the big draws of Godot. Unity Pro is $150/month per seat. The fact that it's open source is also big, because there are often bugs in the Unity engine that I can't fix since I don't have source access. A lot of devs also like jumping on new technology because it feels good to learn new things. Oh and then because it's open sourc…

I know quite a few game devs (side-effect of both living in Malmö and being active on the TiGsource forums) and if there is one common thing I hear about Unity it's how it does not seem to care at all about backwards compatibility, and how upgrades can completely screw over projects. I don't know what the story is with Godot (beyond the breaking changes between 2.0 and 3.0 that was mentioned in the linked blog post)…

Every version change, even minor revisions, come with a real risk of breaking your compiled asset bundles. From shaders to light maps to referenced classes. It's a huge amount of effort to keep a project tracking Unity version upgrades.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#52

Post by vanderZwan »

kris-s wrote: post #18
eatonphil wrote: post #5

Trying to find the best way to introduce friends/family (with programming backgrounds) to game programming for fun. (So not kid-focused stuff like Scratch or Logo.) Godot looks pretty good. Is there anything else you've had success with?

PICO-8 might be a fun starting point. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

TIC-80 and LIKO-12 are pretty decent open source "clones"

https://tic.computer/

https://ramilego4game.itch.io/liko12

And then there's the BASIC engine:

https://basicengine.org/

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#53

Post by ljm »

vanderZwan wrote: post #3

I wonder if Godot has a chance of becoming the Blender of game engines. From the way it is growing it's starting to look like a real long-term possibility to me, especially for the smaller game studios.

A real draw for me is working with C++ in it, since both Unity and Unreal appear to favour managed languages (C#, some JS variant, some weird Python style thing, etc.)

No real reason for preferring C++ except I want to learn it, and my pet project is a little game rather than yet another web app/thing that renders DB records to HTML/thing that takes one JSON blob and turns it to another. I never did computer science so this sort of trial by fire is super appealing to me.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#54

Post by danShumway »

What's Godot's C# support like nowadays? I remember there being some criticism of the early implementation, but I haven't checked back recently.

I keep on getting really curious about Godot, it seems like an engine that should be up my alley, and I really am in the market for Open Source engines. I don't want to keep coding everything myself.

But I'm a little thrown off by the idea of learning a new scripting language, and dipping into C++ for an engine like this seems counterproductive. If I cared that much about memory management, I'd probably write a game-specific engine again.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#55

Post by cpeterso »

vanderZwan wrote: post #50
mroche wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.patreon.com/godotengine I can’t remember if the team is getting outside funding from grants or such, but this is the main payment system I believe.

They mention that Mozilla supports their HTML5/WASM efforts, which makes sense

Godot Engine was awarded $50,000 in 2019 by Mozilla as part of the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program. Godot also received a MOSS grant of $20,000 in 2016.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#56

Post by rozab »

iamwil wrote: post #30

It seems like some of you have some real love for Godot. How come you decided to use/recommend Godot over Unity when it was less mature? Was it much better along some axis that Unity didn't provide? What makes it better along that axis? Usually happens when something is 10x better at something new that people care about that the incumbent is blind to or is structurally incapable of addressing. I'm just wondering what…

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/ef8jrh/unity_in_20...

Here's a meme which is actually very illuminating. Someone in the comments mentions checklist-driven development, which seems about right. Unity doesn't feel like a complete product right now, it's full of systems which are either incomplete and badly documented or outdated and buggy.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#57

Post by ljm »

markus_zhang wrote: post #25
ljm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious as I’m playing around with these myself and trying to make a decision from a beginner’s perspective (right now I’m just rolling my own from scratch with libsdl, to get to grips with C++ and the fundamental concepts). What sold you on godot over unity?

just curious did you check out the C++/11 binding of libsdl?

Oh, I didn't know about this! I've been using the raw library and handling cleanup myself (and understanding when and where I need to do it). It's probably a boon I started on PHP4 which basically had a 1:1 C interface for a lot of things, including manually deallocating variables to save memory and depending on variables passed by reference, so I knew what to expect even if I lacked the experience of the underlying system.

Thanks for pointing it out, I'll take a look at it.

(edit: I am using the fancy renderer in favour of the old surface manipulation; I guess that's a step up, comparing the code)

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#58

Post by Buttons840 »

iamwil wrote: post #30

It seems like some of you have some real love for Godot. How come you decided to use/recommend Godot over Unity when it was less mature? Was it much better along some axis that Unity didn't provide? What makes it better along that axis? Usually happens when something is 10x better at something new that people care about that the incumbent is blind to or is structurally incapable of addressing. I'm just wondering what…

I use Linux and Godot is easy to install and use on Linux, and fits with the open-source philosophy. I have not made professional games, but I had a good enough time playing around with Godot for a few hours here and there that I recommend it when I can.

It also works well with Git, which as a coder first, game creator second, I appreciate. I don't think this is the case with Unity, but I am not sure.

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#59

Post by blensor »

iamwil wrote: post #30

It seems like some of you have some real love for Godot. How come you decided to use/recommend Godot over Unity when it was less mature? Was it much better along some axis that Unity didn't provide? What makes it better along that axis? Usually happens when something is 10x better at something new that people care about that the incumbent is blind to or is structurally incapable of addressing. I'm just wondering what…

I have been looking into godot every once in a while when it came up on HN and liked what you could do but was not convinced that I want to use it.

Recently I wanted to write a workout game for the Oculus Quest for my own use and I am really impressed how well VR development works in Godot. I have never made a godot game before and never made a VR game before and it is really progressing nicely. An added benefit is that one of the devs has already added experimental hand tracking support. So even if the big game studios do not support it yet godot games can already support it, which is a real benefit for a workout game where you also have to do pushups (unsing the controller is a bit unwielding there)

For those who are interested what a first game looks in godot

https://github.com/mgschwan/VRWorkout

Re: Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

#60

Post by iamwil »

Thaxll wrote: post #44
iamwil wrote: post #30

It seems like some of you have some real love for Godot. How come you decided to use/recommend Godot over Unity when it was less mature? Was it much better along some axis that Unity didn't provide? What makes it better along that axis? Usually happens when something is 10x better at something new that people care about that the incumbent is blind to or is structurally incapable of addressing. I'm just wondering what…

Godot is not even close to Unity, it's a toy engine for garage project.

And that's exactly it! Why do people adopt seemingly less mature technologies? If they never did, we'd never have new stuff, and startups would never win! But they do, and the question is, how does it happen?

The canonical story is described by Clay Christensen in the Innovator's Dilemma, where the new toy X is inferior to the mature Y along most dimensions. However, something changed in the world, and people are starting to value a dimension where the new toy X is 10x better than the mature Y along a single dimension. And that allows the new toy X to gain a foothold. I'm super curious as to how Godot managed it, even if it has been a long time in the making.

Of course, not all toys end up replacing the incumbent. But by dismissing everything as a toy, you're shutting off a line of inquiry to see how this process happens. If you're on HN, it's a good chance you're a programmer and by definition a creator. And if you're at all ever wanting to bring something new into the world, it'd behoove you to understand how new creations are accepted.

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