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Luxe Game Engine

luxeengine.com

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Re: Luxe Game Engine

#51

Post by socalgal2 »

joeld42 wrote: post #48
socalgal2 wrote: post #30

Maybe I missed them but given they say at the top of the page > make games for Mac, Linux, Windows, and *Web* it would help a bunch if they linked to some web demos/games

Some Jam Games with web builds: https://itch.io/jam/luxe/entries?ref=luxeengine.com https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/terrarium-combinarium https://joeld42.itch.io/bridges More jam games that I didn't make a web build for but downloads are available: https://joeld42.itch.io/lighthouse-keeper https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/cargo-space https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/last-mile https://ldjam.com/even…

Thanks. Though, I guess I didn't make myself clear. To sell me on the engine working on the web I'd need to see a high quality game/demo running on the web. Instead, the links are to a bunch of game jam games that look no better than raw JS and then several native only games. I'm not trying to diss the engine. It looks great. Rather, I'm suggesting that impressive instant live demos speak louder than words.

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#52

Post by npinsker »

josephcsible wrote: post #49

The "Restrictions" section is incompatible with ever being FOSS, and for people who don't care about that, there's no advantage to this over Unreal or Unity.

It's not pretending to be FOSS. Like other engines, you need to pay them if you make money.

But no advantage seems like a stretch? (or at least, in future, might be a stretch) They're aiming for a superior workflow for small games (e.g. making stylized rendering way easier for non-technical devs). Also their pricing is 10% of Unity's, which is itself around 10% of Unreal's.

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#53

Post by npinsker »

Uehreka wrote: post #35
999900000999 wrote: post #8

It's neat, but not better than real open source solutions. Pay is what you want unless your at work and then it's price is under NDA isn't friendly. Godot is still probably the best FOSS engine right now. Arguably it's strongly in 3rd place behind Unity/Unreal.

Idk that I’d say it’s in 3rd place. My guess would be that something like Source Engine is 3rd. Having worked with Unreal, Unity and Godot, Godot is extremely rough. It has a terrible scripting language, an abysmal script editing UI, all while lacking the sophistication of Unity and Unreal’s rendering. It gets way too much benefit of the doubt because it’s open source. We desperately need an open source engine that c…

In 2025, Godot games are being released at 40% the rate of Unreal games. This number is growing for Godot at +100% Y/Y, while Unity + Unreal are growing at +15% (https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/?max_release=2025-12-...). By this metric at least, it's a very secure 3rd (with GameMaker in a distant 4th), and could take 2nd in as few as 3 years.

I mostly do agree with what you said, but the project seems (slowly) headed in generally the right direction, and as time goes on, the space of games that only Unity can make will diminish. It's a totally defensible choice for almost any 2D indie game -- which wasn't true just two years ago -- and it's working towards being a viable alternative on XR and consoles too.

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#54

Post by Uehreka »

CactusRocket wrote: post #50
Uehreka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk that I’d say it’s in 3rd place. My guess would be that something like Source Engine is 3rd. Having worked with Unreal, Unity and Godot, Godot is extremely rough. It has a terrible scripting language, an abysmal script editing UI, all while lacking the sophistication of Unity and Unreal’s rendering. It gets way too much benefit of the doubt because it’s open source. We desperately need an open source engine that c…

> We desperately need an open source engine that can compete with Unity and Unreal I think this is a pipe dream. There's a lot of money behind Unity and Unreal, that buys a lot of developers. Actually I think it's amazing how far Godot has come, and what kind of amazing and big updates they regularly do given how little money they get, and being open source. It's seeing a lot of active development, so it's definitely…

> I think this is a pipe dream. There's a lot of money behind Unity and Unreal, that buys a lot of developers.

I don’t think it’s a pipe dream. I watched Blender slowly build up from a “nice thing for hobbyists” to “actually kind of professional grade” to “the tool used to make an Oscar-winning film”. Blender and its Foundation provide a blueprint for how open source projects can mount a meaningful challenge in a highly complex and cutthroat space, and anyone looking to do the same for game engines should study their moves.

> This is just a bad faith attack on the Godot's team

I may have been rude, but I was not arguing in bad faith. The decisions they’ve made and their fumbled execution (I could rant for an hour about GDScript’s copious footguns and bad design choices) do not comport with what I expect from a project that wants to one day take on Unity and Unreal.

If Godot is in fact just a fun little hobbyist thing, then yeah, they don’t deserve this level of vitriol from me. But if that’s the case, their community needs to stop overhyping them and suggesting Godot every time people have complaints about Unity/Unreal.

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#55

Post by Rohansi »

999900000999 wrote: post #41
Uehreka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk that I’d say it’s in 3rd place. My guess would be that something like Source Engine is 3rd. Having worked with Unreal, Unity and Godot, Godot is extremely rough. It has a terrible scripting language, an abysmal script editing UI, all while lacking the sophistication of Unity and Unreal’s rendering. It gets way too much benefit of the doubt because it’s open source. We desperately need an open source engine that c…

Source isn't really a publicly available engine. Valve doesn't appear to have much interest in licensing it. You're not wrong about Godot, but; 1. You can always fork/modify it. Getting a source code license for Unity is a 6 figure proposition. 2. Being open source is a big deal. No phone home spyware(Unity). Keep 100% of your revenue. 3. C# support is OK. Its very slowly getting better. I'm not a Godot zealot, one i…

A modified Source 2 is kind of available right now with S&box. It uses C# with the latest .NET, no Mono. Not open source but licensing should be better than Unity.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/ https://sbox.game/give-me-that

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#56

Post by danbolt »

Uehreka wrote: post #35
999900000999 wrote: post #8

It's neat, but not better than real open source solutions. Pay is what you want unless your at work and then it's price is under NDA isn't friendly. Godot is still probably the best FOSS engine right now. Arguably it's strongly in 3rd place behind Unity/Unreal.

Idk that I’d say it’s in 3rd place. My guess would be that something like Source Engine is 3rd. Having worked with Unreal, Unity and Godot, Godot is extremely rough. It has a terrible scripting language, an abysmal script editing UI, all while lacking the sophistication of Unity and Unreal’s rendering. It gets way too much benefit of the doubt because it’s open source. We desperately need an open source engine that c…

> It has a terrible scripting language

Curious, could you elaborate on what you find terrible about it? I’ve been toying around with GDScript for a little while, and I think it’s actually quite well-suited for developing 3D games.

Or, they get a lot right with gradual typing, reference counting, and low-cost marshalling between native code and the script VM. The language authors know it’s a DSL, so they add specific features such as `$` and `@export` that are idiomatic to the engine’s architecture.

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#57

Post by BobbyBrownGD »

Uehreka wrote: post #54
CactusRocket wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We desperately need an open source engine that can compete with Unity and Unreal I think this is a pipe dream. There's a lot of money behind Unity and Unreal, that buys a lot of developers. Actually I think it's amazing how far Godot has come, and what kind of amazing and big updates they regularly do given how little money they get, and being open source. It's seeing a lot of active development, so it's definitely…

> I think this is a pipe dream. There's a lot of money behind Unity and Unreal, that buys a lot of developers. I don’t think it’s a pipe dream. I watched Blender slowly build up from a “nice thing for hobbyists” to “actually kind of professional grade” to “the tool used to make an Oscar-winning film”. Blender and its Foundation provide a blueprint for how open source projects can mount a meaningful challenge in a hig…

As someone who has barely dabbled in GDScript, I'd like to hear about these design choices and footguns.

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#58

Post by ImprobableTruth »

danbolt wrote: post #56
Uehreka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk that I’d say it’s in 3rd place. My guess would be that something like Source Engine is 3rd. Having worked with Unreal, Unity and Godot, Godot is extremely rough. It has a terrible scripting language, an abysmal script editing UI, all while lacking the sophistication of Unity and Unreal’s rendering. It gets way too much benefit of the doubt because it’s open source. We desperately need an open source engine that c…

> It has a terrible scripting language Curious, could you elaborate on what you find terrible about it? I’ve been toying around with GDScript for a little while, and I think it’s actually quite well-suited for developing 3D games. Or, they get a lot right with gradual typing, reference counting, and low-cost marshalling between native code and the script VM. The language authors know it’s a DSL, so they add specific…

I think the concept of a game DSL is cool, but it just feels so undercooked to me.

Like, I'm a huge fan of gradual typing, especially TypeScript's, but gdscript's is just so primitive. Not even to speak of something like intersection or union types, even something basic like an interfaces mechanism is missing. has_method is an awful substitute - in general way too much relies on strings, making even simple refactoring a headache and breaks autocompletion. Lots of things also just aren't typable e.g. because generics are missing, pushing one to Variant. These aren't deal breakers, especially for the small-ish projects I've done, but it just feels bad.

A 'fully realized' version of gdscript would probably be great, but as is I'm just really not very fond of it and progress currently isn't exactly happening at a rapid pace (which is of course understandable).

Also - and this is definitely a lot more subjective - but I find its C++ FFI pretty ugly, even for basic stuff like working with structs. In theory using gsdcript as glue and C++ for the more core things would be a great approach (like unreal with its blueprints), but in practice I just want to avoid it as much as possible.

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#59

Post by npinsker »

danbolt wrote: post #56
Uehreka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk that I’d say it’s in 3rd place. My guess would be that something like Source Engine is 3rd. Having worked with Unreal, Unity and Godot, Godot is extremely rough. It has a terrible scripting language, an abysmal script editing UI, all while lacking the sophistication of Unity and Unreal’s rendering. It gets way too much benefit of the doubt because it’s open source. We desperately need an open source engine that c…

> It has a terrible scripting language Curious, could you elaborate on what you find terrible about it? I’ve been toying around with GDScript for a little while, and I think it’s actually quite well-suited for developing 3D games. Or, they get a lot right with gradual typing, reference counting, and low-cost marshalling between native code and the script VM. The language authors know it’s a DSL, so they add specific…

Ironically, both features you mention are ones that seem questionable. `$` feels like a bit of an anti-pattern to me because it encourages hard-coding strings, so if you move, rename, or switch components around, it silently breaks. Unity's encouragement of pointers feels cleaner.

Godot has `@export`, but also `@export_multiline`, `@export_dir`, `@export_global_file`, etc. which produce slightly different behaviors. Unity supports true metadata through C# attributes (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/advanced-top...) -- with all the power of C#, so you can freely add multiple attributes with parameters (which themselves are type-checked) and even program your own custom ones. You can add custom C# attributes, then use those attributes to drive the display of the inspector, which is a perfect little DSL solution that -- because of GDScript -- feels very far away from Godot at the moment.

Re: Luxe Game Engine

#60

Post by archievillain »

npinsker wrote: post #59
danbolt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has a terrible scripting language Curious, could you elaborate on what you find terrible about it? I’ve been toying around with GDScript for a little while, and I think it’s actually quite well-suited for developing 3D games. Or, they get a lot right with gradual typing, reference counting, and low-cost marshalling between native code and the script VM. The language authors know it’s a DSL, so they add specific…

Ironically, both features you mention are ones that seem questionable. `$` feels like a bit of an anti-pattern to me because it encourages hard-coding strings, so if you move, rename, or switch components around, it silently breaks. Unity's encouragement of pointers feels cleaner. Godot has `@export`, but also `@export_multiline`, `@export_dir`, `@export_global_file`, etc. which produce slightly different behaviors.…

Can you please elaborate what you mean by Unity "pointers"? As far as I am aware, in Unity, either you find the node by name via `GameObject.find` or you assign a reference via the inspector. Both of these features also exist in Godot. Actually, thanks to unique names (the `%` notation), I'd say Godot wins overall. But I haven't used Unity in years, so I don't know if they've come up with a better solution (in which case Godot should, obviously, copy it).
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