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

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

#61

Post by edflsafoiewq »

rstupek wrote: post #25
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…

That's one of the issues with open source, polishing isn't "fun", where massive rewrites to a new thing are.

I don't know about fun, but structurally, polish is one of the hardest things to contribute to an open source project. Polishing usually has a very large "activation energy", where the overhead of synchronizing, making a PR, building consensus, etc. dwarfs the actual effort in the patch. Polishing may involve hundred or thousands of small changes like this. Outsiders are likely to prefer contributing large features where the effort involved is more commensurate to the benefits.

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

#62

Post by ohgodplsno »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #55
mkl95 wrote: post #2

> After an unsatisfactory attempt at using Bullet, Godot 4.0 returns to its own physics engine which, despite not being a high end physics engine like PhysX, aims to offer a lot more flexibility and “just works” capabilities to users. This is a bit of a red flag if one of their goals is for the engine to be used on AAA games.

Why? What commercial game is physics-heavy? Most commercial games have scripted character movement (every FPS, RPG, strategy games, basically almost every genre) and the only physics objects are random falling objects that don't affect gameplay... Cloth simulation, cool but can be faked and doesn't affect gameplay. Ragdolls, only really used when characters die and again, can be faked. So name a single AAA game that…

Most AAA game engines have both ways to bake in physics _and_ to use the exact same system, real time. If you work with Unreal Engine, you use the same tool to get your cloth physics and you can just click a button to bake it and replay it. And this applies to... everything in the engine.

Moving outside of your editor absolutely blows, and the less you do it, the better it is. Unless the alternatives are thousands of times better (nothing comes close to Substance Painter, and tools like Houdini still do some things better than internal tools for example. And of course, well, 3D modeling is still a hellscape of zbrush and Maya.), you just stay in with your tools. Nothing sucks more than having yet another editor and needing to have a pipeline to keep everything in sync.

It's not about needing crazy physics calculations directly in your engine (although your particle system being affected by it can do cool things), it's about not having to deal with yet another tool that fixes one problem and brings in 20 more.

Also, as said, the days of fully scripted movement are pretty much gone. There's physics interactions any time you have vehicles involved unless you want to feel it slide around and feel like crap, for example.

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

#63

Post by enragedcacti »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #55
mkl95 wrote: post #2

> After an unsatisfactory attempt at using Bullet, Godot 4.0 returns to its own physics engine which, despite not being a high end physics engine like PhysX, aims to offer a lot more flexibility and “just works” capabilities to users. This is a bit of a red flag if one of their goals is for the engine to be used on AAA games.

Why? What commercial game is physics-heavy? Most commercial games have scripted character movement (every FPS, RPG, strategy games, basically almost every genre) and the only physics objects are random falling objects that don't affect gameplay... Cloth simulation, cool but can be faked and doesn't affect gameplay. Ragdolls, only really used when characters die and again, can be faked. So name a single AAA game that…

KSP2, Breath of the Wild, Portal/Portal 2, Red Faction, basically every VR game (HL: Alyx definitely qualifies as AAA).

I agree it's not all that common but they are definitely out there. As for whether you could build those with Godot's engine I have no idea.

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

#64

Post by tpxl »

snarfy wrote: post #42
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…

> limited controls for navigating around the 3D viewport I still haven't figured this out yet. It's really weird it's so difficult to navigate the viewport, which is a really basic operation for a 3D engine. I've made plenty of levels using the unreal editor, but I can't figure it out in godot.

What's missing? It's got rotating (MMB), panning (Shift + MMB), zoom (scrollwheel) and focus on object (F).

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

#65

Post by worldsayshi »

rstupek wrote: post #25
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…

That's one of the issues with open source, polishing isn't "fun", where massive rewrites to a new thing are.

I don't understand why there hasn't been a widely successful crowd financing platform for open source yet.

I imagine it has to be a bit complex but it sounds like a solvable problem.

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

#66

Post by fbdab103 »

fckgnad wrote: post #49
throw_m239339 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's a relatively young open source project. It took Blender 25 years to get where it is now and it still has some major flaws compared to the paid competition, and will need extensive rewrites if it wants to move forward because right now the C part is a horrible mess. Godot isn't going to compete against Unity or Unreal anytime soon. Godot's team doesn't have billions at their disposal like Epic or Unity. ed…

I think though that there's an apex all game engines reach where technological progression just slows down even when you have millions of developer dollars to throw at it. It's the reason why something like blender can catch up with state of the art commercial offerings and I think Godot could go through the same thing.

Isn't that true of all software? At some point, things should be able to be fully feature complete. Maybe update the UI toolkit every five years to appear fashionable.

In practice, the industry loves to replace fully working projects rather than tweak existing, so we will never get to such a state of nirvana.

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

#68

Post by fbdab103 »

enragedcacti wrote: post #63
Mikeb85 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What commercial game is physics-heavy? Most commercial games have scripted character movement (every FPS, RPG, strategy games, basically almost every genre) and the only physics objects are random falling objects that don't affect gameplay... Cloth simulation, cool but can be faked and doesn't affect gameplay. Ragdolls, only really used when characters die and again, can be faked. So name a single AAA game that…

KSP2, Breath of the Wild, Portal/Portal 2, Red Faction, basically every VR game (HL: Alyx definitely qualifies as AAA). I agree it's not all that common but they are definitely out there. As for whether you could build those with Godot's engine I have no idea.

I think that list just emphasizes the parents point. The majority of games are getting by without dedicated physics sandboxes.

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

#69

Post by snarfy »

tpxl wrote: post #64
snarfy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> limited controls for navigating around the 3D viewport I still haven't figured this out yet. It's really weird it's so difficult to navigate the viewport, which is a really basic operation for a 3D engine. I've made plenty of levels using the unreal editor, but I can't figure it out in godot.

What's missing? It's got rotating (MMB), panning (Shift + MMB), zoom (scrollwheel) and focus on object (F).

Zoom is limited. It's not infinite zoom. How do I move through the level in Z direction? I saw a video mention WASD keys but it didn't work for me. In unreal you can fly through the level using mouse and keyboard. WASD is cardinal direction and mouse is camera rotation. In godot mouse wheel zooms the camera, but I couldn't find a way to 'move' the camera in Z.

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

#70

Post by fckgnad »

fbdab103 wrote: post #66
fckgnad wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think though that there's an apex all game engines reach where technological progression just slows down even when you have millions of developer dollars to throw at it. It's the reason why something like blender can catch up with state of the art commercial offerings and I think Godot could go through the same thing.

Isn't that true of all software? At some point, things should be able to be fully feature complete. Maybe update the UI toolkit every five years to appear fashionable. In practice, the industry loves to replace fully working projects rather than tweak existing, so we will never get to such a state of nirvana.

Can't prove if it's true of all software. But examples of categories of this type seem to exist. Linux and blender are two examples.

The software never gets to total nirvana. What happens is it gets to a state of nearly nirvana such that changes are tiny.

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