This was a shockingly good read. Thank you very much :)

Unreal engine has shared source and accepts PRs, so you could potentially edit the source code to fix issues as well.

Every engine I've used has some really good stuff and some surprising limitations.

For Frostbite... If you've worked with it you know. Probably my least favourite.

In UE4 I love the environment but can't get over how cumbersome some aspects of graphics programming are. Especially how difficult it is to work with compute shaders.

For Unity I really like how smooth the workflow is, especially for shader programming. Having used it for a little more than a year now I'm really surprised how nice it is to work with. I barely even mind it being primarily C#.

Firstly, the Visual Shader GUI in Godot has pretty series issues on my Macbook. Secondly, it's impossible to do any effects with a stencil shader [1].

Most of the useful post-processing effects (bloom, depth-of-field etc) are implemented out of the box, so this also means that there isn't a way (AFAIK) to implement post-processing effects yourself.

Godot also only has simplex noise implemented out of the box, so you need to jump through some hoops to get anything else included (which is super useful in shaders).

[1] also has some images of the way to implement outline shaders in Godot, which is to move the faces of object out by a scaling factor and then render them as unshaded, which leaves some gnarly artifacts at the corners.

[1] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/23721

I gave up on Godot three years ago because I couldn't do something very simple: set the origin correctly on 2D sprites so that they correctly show above things behind them. There is a setting for it (mentioned in the docs, at them time, for the exact thing I wanted) and it did indeed fix it, but it also made my sprite be drawn offset from where the editor showed it, which was immensely annoying.

I hit a few annoyances like that.

But! Godot has not been standing still and is constantly improving. I haven't had a chance to try it out again since, but I wouldn't be surprised if the issue I hit have been fixed. Its just important to note that it doesn't have the same manpower behind it that Unreal or Unity have and to temper your expectations accordingly. It is a great engine, though, and getting better all the time.

I'm also still very proud of the fact that there's a tiny bit of code I contributed in godot-cpp :)

Maybe it's biased from my personal experience but I feel people overestimate the importance of the engine features for big games. When you do big games, you often write everything yourself

My friend works at a studio who's doing an open world game in Unity and they did : their own terrain system (with their custom tessellation, collision system, etc.), their own LOD system, their own pathfinding algo, their own crowd sim, their own multiplayer sync, etc.

Similarly, this person :

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs1njLLfUBCTAfSZ3Q7gq2Q

Did not had to wait for Godot (pun intended) 4.0 to make a very cool terrain, particle and water system.

The part that does really matter is the core rendering engine, and this should improve drastically in Godot 4.0

I gave up and am waiting for 4.0 release when I couldn't reasonably implement foreground transparency around the mouse.

I found a lot of annoying GUI bugs for Mac, last I tried ~1 year ago. Seems like most of the developers use Linux.