I don't make a lot of "games", but I do make a lot of tools these days (native OS GUI/console-cli etc.). And I feel like Godot wouldn't really be a good fit for such things, or am I wrong?
Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
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Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
#73Godot felt frustrating to use every time I've tried it, on both 4.x and 3.x versions. Compared to Unity, it was a massive improvement, the editor was much faster without crashing, and it had a reasonable node-graph design. However, I think some of the "elegant" designs pursued in Godot and some up-and-coming Rust game engines often end up feeling very time-consuming to fit your code in their abstraction (whether it b…
Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
#74Would Godot be a decent engine for kids around 12-14 years old? I don't know a lot about it, but would like to suggest something for a person I know. I'd also be curious what the Godot support is like in terms of maintaining older releases. I think it would be a mistake to tell a young person to use a beta version since they could hit a lot of bugs and get discouraged, but having them use an existing version that doe…
GameMaker is pretty much the best game engine to get introduced to programming. It has a visual scripting tool that lets you write basic logic without any raw textual coding, but also provides a smooth transition path to learn an actual scripting language (GML) when the child becomes more ambitious. I’ve started programming at a young age thanks to this. (Godot had a visual scripting system but they removed it in 4.0…
Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
#75I was surprised to not feel limited by gdscript (having no python background and doing most work in JS for the past decade). I picked it up quickly and it's well documented and integrated into vscode.
Not sure if it would be my choice for a large game with millions of entities (e.g. an online RPG that needs an ECS system) but for small 2d games it is a delight to work with.
I may be the minority here, but I hope Godot doesn't try to cater to AA/AAA devs and keeps small indies front and center as the focus.
Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
#76Godot felt frustrating to use every time I've tried it, on both 4.x and 3.x versions. Compared to Unity, it was a massive improvement, the editor was much faster without crashing, and it had a reasonable node-graph design. However, I think some of the "elegant" designs pursued in Godot and some up-and-coming Rust game engines often end up feeling very time-consuming to fit your code in their abstraction (whether it b…
But I've embraced godot for 2D games and it has been wonderful. I get more code reuse out of the node system than I ever got out of class hierarchies elsewhere. I find myself with the time to set up a lot more test scenarios where I can play two things side by side to find the better feel -- rather than just getting one to work at all.
Yes, that's all subjective and might just be me getting better at game development, but I was immediately productive in Godot, and I haven't run into a roadblock for what I happen to be doing. I imagine there may be a game type, or otherwise simple technique that is nearly impossible in godot, but simple elsewhere; that's true of every game engine it seems.
Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
#77> 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…
Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
#79What's missing and not in the article is a showcase game, a proof that this engine can deliver a real AA/AAA on the market.
And Godot has pretty much been DOA for AA/AAA development since then.
It doesn't help that they just dropped the Bullet physics engine because it was "too hard" to implement and now promise to make an "engine agnostic" interface for physics engines, which is significantly more more work than just figuring out how to implement a single physics engine (and extending that implementation to be engine agnostic).
Godot is the anti-Blender; it's perpetually 70% of the way "there" but they are always abandoning that last 30% because it's too hard, or too boring, to finish.
(For comparison, at this point in its lifecycle, i.e., 9 years old, Unity was well-polished and had already been the choice for indie and mobile game development for several years. In the past week alone, multiple one-developer games made in Unity have made it to the front page of HN.)
Re: Godot for AA/AAA game development – What's missing?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And blockers on patching this into the editor?
Context: I have a very basic engine written in Rust/WGPU. Mainly using for chemistry sims. This is its default nav system.