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

godotengine.org

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

#81

Post by worldsayshi »

Karsteski wrote: post #78
worldsayshi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Patreon exists, but I hesitate to contribute to projects/people through Patreon as I want to give them as little money as possible...

I also feel that something like Patreon doesn't reflect the semi-decentralised way open source is built.

There needs to be features like feature/bug-bounties that you can trust even if you don't fully trust the repo-owner/maintainer?

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

#82

Post by light_hue_1 »

snarfy wrote: post #69
tpxl wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

Hold the right mouse button and press WASD Q/E. It works as you would expect. You can press shift+F to toggle this mode if you don't want to hold down the button.

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

#83

Post by gamblor956 »

donmcronald wrote: post #3

Would 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…

It depends on what kind of games they want to make and what they hope to get out of it.

A simple side scroller? Gamemaker.

A more-advanced 2D game? Gamemaker or Unity.

A 3D game? Unity.

An FPS or other first-person game? Unreal.

Programming skills that will be useful for a career in programming generally or in game development specifically? Unity or Unreal.

With Godot, you'll be perpetually waiting for Godot to finish up and polish the 30% of features you actually want/need. I gave Godot 5 years before I gave up on it. Unity has announced, implemented, and abandoned features in less time than it takes Godot to finish that last 30%.

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

#84

Post by light_hue_1 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #80
snarfy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As most people working on these are probably aware, this is very easy to implement in a 3d engine using a quaternion orientation that rotates the WASD vectors, updating position and view orientation accordingly. Can do it with FPS friendly things like WASD + Q and E for roll, and space and C for up/dn. And blockers on patching this into the editor? Context: I have a very basic engine written in Rust/WGPU. Mainly usin…

> Can do it with FPS friendly things like WASD + Q and E for roll, and space and C for up/dn. > > And blockers on patching this into the editor?

This is exactly how the editor works. It's just not the default mode. They call it freelook mode. You can either hold the right mouse button or toggle it with shift+F.

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

#85

Post by vblanco »

koolala wrote: post #24
Rhedox wrote: post #10

I really don't like the RenderingDevice abstraction they've ended up with. It's strongly reminiscent of OpenGL, doesn't expose command buffers or queues (no async compute). Barriers are too coarse. There's also no support for a bindless approach, no GPU driven rendering or even just GPU culling.

What's an example of something that does blindless fully GPU driven rendering? Would it mean CPU lag wouldn't slow your game because the camera could be fully controlled by the GPU?

I wrote extensively about that as part of my vulkan guide. https://vkguide.dev/docs/gpudriven . The TLDR of it is that you have the cpu upload scene information to the GPU, and then the GPU performs culling and batching by itself in a series of compute shaders. In most games the scene is 99% static, so you can upload the scene at the beggining and never touch it again. this decreases CPU-GPU traffic by orders of magnitude, and if used right, gives you 10x or more performance improvements. Unreal 5 Nanite tech is based on this concept.

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

#86

Post by qwery »

Whether it's the scripting language or the physics engine, Godot's in-house solutions (and general differences to other game engines) always draw a bit of criticism. The article mentions the 'considerable amount of issues' for the in-house physics solution, but it doesn't make a direct statement about the quantity or severity of issues to do with including bullet over the years.

Hugely powerful and complex physics engines have become the default solution to practically everything motion or collision related in games. But most games don't need most of what the big/serious physics engines provide. Unfortunately, there is an expectation that game engines come with one of these included and so they are, usually as the only built-in way to perform collision detection.

If you're making a game that has modest 'physics' requirements, you're stuck trying to break the big physics engine to get it to do less. If you're making a game that does have a need for a high-end solution (e.g. PhysX), it becomes increasingly painful as you are forced to access the physics engine via the APIs that the game engine provided.

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

#87

Post by light_hue_1 »

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.

> This is a bit of a red flag if one of their goals is for the engine to be used on AAA games.

As much of a red flag as say Unreal? Who also dumped both Bullet and PhysX.

The solution where you can plug your own engine in is perfect. None of the physics engines are good enough for all games as all engines have discovered. Better to have something simple and in house for 80% of games who need only the basics and then let you bring your own engine.

Unreal by the way doesn't even let you do that anymore. PhysX support is being removed entirely in 5.

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

#88

Post by alex7o »

sylware wrote: post #32

On elf/linux, it is missing a static libstdc++ which has the decency to libdl(dlopen/dlsym/dlclose) all its (module/version)s&(symbol/version)s from the system. But the culprit are c++ gcc devs, not godot devs.

Have not tested this but can you not build with llvm's libc++.

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

#90

Post by Karsteski »

worldsayshi wrote: post #81
Karsteski wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon exists, but I hesitate to contribute to projects/people through Patreon as I want to give them as little money as possible...

I also feel that something like Patreon doesn't reflect the semi-decentralised way open source is built. There needs to be features like feature/bug-bounties that you can trust even if you don't fully trust the repo-owner/maintainer?

I'd be more okay with donating via Patreon if they didn't do the thing where every internet platform that becomes successful feels the need to start going down the political route. I'm not sure if this is a more of an issue due to the employees, or due to social media pressure, or if it's just "keeping up with the times" but I hate it. And it's also so US-centric, which makes sense as they are usually US-based companies, but it just irritates me looking from the outside.
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