https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/45628
Eventually Godot will stabilize and be to game engines what Blender currently is to 3D modelers. If I had time to learn the Godot C++ code I would volunteer to help but I want to actually make video games instead of working on an engine.
Godot is not beautiful modern code or anything, but it's definitely not inscrutable layers of spaghetti which require deep expertise. It's very readable and compiles reasonably fast.
I've been funding it (a small amount monthly) for a long time now. I wish it had existed about 15 years ago in college when I had lots of time on my hands for toying with game making.
I can't remember the exact details around this, since I only used Godot for a couple of jams and the last time was a year ago. But I was wondering if others have had the same reaction, perhaps this could be fixed? I love the engine in general, but this thing irked me.
The tree turns out to be a great place to keep things, and you get several levels of control. Here’s how I think about it now.
`_init`: constructor. I usually use this to create dynamic child nodes
`_enter_tree`: now we have a parent; subscribe to signals, copy initial config, etc
`_ready`: I can be sure that all child nodes have called _ready, so anything I depend on there is… er, ready
`_exit_tree`: cleanup, especially anything we did with the parent and other ancestors. usually symmetric to `_enter_tree` if I’m using them
I just did a find all in my biggest recent project, and I never actually use `queue_free` or `free` for explicit memory management. Most of the times when I’ve thought I needed to, I actually was creating a bug
On a more serious note, I do expect test-ability isn't a high customer priority for Godot. Godot is self-hosted, maybe check how they run their tests?
I'm really excited for many features of Godot 4, and GDScript is perfectly adequate for UI glue code and stuff, but to write a serious game you really want C#.
I haven't followed game development in a long time, but has the industry moved to C#? I thought C# was limited to Unity and everyone else was still using C++?
The biggest player that uses it is Unity, but even they have their own special fork of Mono to get it to play nice.
Full Disclosure: I work for a Microsoft/Xbox Studio.
This is ridiculous. You absolutely can write a full game with GDScript or GDScript and C++. Keep in mind Godot has first class support for C++.
In fact, I'd argue C++ is far better than a bolted on C#...
Does GDScript have good debugging, linting, and profiling tools?
I'm not a game developer, but I'd love to hear your perspective on some of the criticisms I've encountered on the topic of scripting languages for game development.
One of the main criticisms I've heard of using scripting languages for game development is that they tend to be lacking when it comes to tooling.
The second form of criticism I've heard is that type issues become a serious problem as the size of game code growns past a certain point.
I still rely on GDNative for really performance critical systems though.
I asked someone on Twitter about this the other day [0], and I'm genuinely curious: what is it about C# that makes game development serious?
0. https://twitter.com/LegatXyotic/status/1552219744723402756
Rust is a joy to write in but I personally find that it asks a lot from you when you just want to ship a game that doesn’t need to be safety rated.
C++ is a great choice but it’s C++ and I’m just not good enough to enjoy a language with fewer guardrails. It also has similar verbosity issues to Rust and (likely because I’m a noob) eats up a lot of my time chasing dumb bugs rather than making a game.
I do most of my game dev in TypeScript because it’s a wonderful language and web is a great platform to easily ship toy games (my specialty). But it just isn’t fast enough for anything major.
Its not always fun or sexy to rewrite a reference type to a value type to get around your GC but you _can_ do that in C#. Its a have your cake and eat it sort of language.
What are the limitations of gdscript you allude to? Let's say I want to render an infinite scrolling hex grid. Why would c# excel or gdscript struggle?
It also doesn't have an all integrated top of the market IDE, only the Godot IDE. (Although I don't think you gain anything from using a 3rd party IDE in a Godot game. Even less something like Visual Studio.)
IIRC (and this could be wrong / have changed since I last looked into it) the idea was to re-work this in Godot 4 to provide more like bindings, so that users could opt to use Mono, .NET 6, CoreCLR, NativeAOT, or whatever version they preferred.
There was even a pull request implementing this feature opened, but they claim the assigned maintainer just didn't have the time to review it yet (over 5 years!). One person can effectively stall all progress out of spite. That's no way to run an open source project.
Just look at this discussion: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2972
The way contributions are accepted (or not) is completely unrelated to the project being open source or not. It's always up to the maintainer to decide whether a feature should be merged or not. Open source projects are not popularity contests.
For a programming language, 5 years is not at all an unusual delay when we're talking about an extension to the basic syntax.
Don't like how they run it? Fork it. The maintainers have ZERO obligation to merge your PRs, especially when they don't actually agree with it.
I'm not sure about this one, I can understand why someone might agree with some of the arguments about list comprehension making readability worse, like stated in this comment: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2972#i...
I have to agree with @pycbouh. While a lot of things python does is good, I really don't like list comprehension, especially when it becomes nested.
numbers = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9]]
print([n for sublist in numbers for n in sublist if n % 2 == 0])
# > [2, 4, 6, 8]
Not very readable, and you save what, 3 lines? Not worth.
Personally, I enjoy both LINQ in C# and Streams in Java, perhaps more than a one liner. But again, that's a personal preference and the opinions are often split about syntax related questions.
The rewrite should make it easier to add new features now.
Also the design of Godot values ease of use and simplicity to an great degree. They are very conservative about adding new features and I think they have a point there.
Also list comprehension is an odd example, I wouldn't really rank it that highly when it comes to features I miss. More annoying for me is not having traits or interfacse. You are expected to go full in with "everything is a node" and are a bit limited when it comes to more advanced abstractions. I understand why they are reluctant adding them though and I respect their commitment to keeping things simple.
So it is absolutely possible to create complex applications with it.
Games engines are generally not used for apps, as games are optimized differently to apps. Games need to run smoothly at a high refresh rates at all times while apps can not hog all CPU power but need also be optimized to not needlessly drain the battery. This is no an issue in Godot specifically because it offers a low processor usage mode though.
So yes, Godot is a decent solution for apps. Only real issue is support for accessibility. There are screen reader plugins but if you want to do it properly, you might be better of with an app using native elements.
Apple's own UI libraries use their graphics engines too(SpriteKit, SceneKit), unfortunately supported only on Apple platforms.
For example, here is kanban PoC made by someone:
https://github.com/alfredbaudisch/Godello
But for web, that could be too much for browsers to handle. Godello loading at webbrowser has only some time watching at spinner, when you have fast Internet connection, loading about 10 MB of code, WASM etc.
But when I tried to save Godot 3D game example to HTML5, and load it to webbrowser, Chromium etc browsers can not handle that much data.
Some webbrowser users have slow connections. If there are many users, they start to complain webpages loading too slowly. With Godot everything is browserside, and generated with save button, from that it's hard to move anything to serverside.
But if you instead code frontend and backend with Javascript, it's possible to move more of frontend Javascript code to run serverside.
The tech that is often used in game engines, especially related to GPU support but also memory management and GUI structure is often 10-100x faster than what is commonly used elsewhere.
Text rendering can be just as nice as any desktop app, it is not trivial but not rocket science either, and quite a few smart guys have been doing nice work in this field.
> ...quite a few smart guys have been doing nice work in this field
can you expand on that? like creating quality of life improvements to existing tools like Godot, or something entirely new but in the spirit of game engines?
But it's just not there yet, things which take seconds in Unity take minutes in Godot. Or are just impossible.
It's not done yet, it's going to probably be done in either late 2023 or 2024. Godot 4 needs to come out, and they need to add mono. I've never been more frustrated with a programming language before I found Godot script, just why.
Why not use Python, why, why not use? I don't know, haxe.
Even Godot's creator tried to calm everybody down, you're comparing what's basically a souped-up hobbyist project by maybe two or 300 volunteers to professional products by multi-billion dollar companies of tens of thousands of people.
All that said, I am fighting through Godot right now and I'm having the most fun with game development I've had in years. I try to armory as well, which is not nearly as advanced as Godot, but has the most welcoming community I've ever seen.
I Feel like, back when I first learned a program when I work with Godot. With mono, which is on 3.5 which is very nice.
Too long. Read, if you want to make a commercial product, you're still stuck using Unity or Unreal,
However, if you want to just make games for the sake of making games.
Godot.
Neither Python nor Haxe (presumably) have built-in types for vectors, quaternions, and matrices. Quite nice convenience features. Though I'd rather write in a lot of other languages than GDscript.
So it isn't as if they couldn't add the support.
Releasing big versions means your game can use version X.Y with only bugfixes to the engine added as updates and you don't have to make fundamental changes when the game engine changes.
That said, I would say a lot of changes can be breaking because backwards compatibility is a much lower priority then code speed or size.
And your friends are clearly just working in a different way than the many people who Godot is a good fit for.
Even beyond hobbyists and new game developers, there are plenty of business models and artistic visions that don’t need a console port or that can indeed outsource it once there’s some financial momentum.
Also paying a third party to port a game to a different platform is not really that uncommon, even in the Unity world. I remember the Dev of The First Tree did exactly this.
It is not like you can just put your game in the PlayStation-store even if you use Unity or Unreal. There is a process to it and your game has to fulfill certain standards.
A good strategy is to first publish for PC and see if the game gains any traction. If it does, well the console port will pay for itself. If not, you saved yourself lot's of work.
See also: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
I could see Nintendo bucking this trend but they have enough IP to be their own island.
It might be smart for Godot to punt; it lets them go faster than Unity and catch up
Are you sure about this? I mean, as awesome as that would be just look at the mobile market - Android had every chance to be a properly open OS (e.g. AOSP), but instead its a mess of flakey drivers, locked down bootloaders and other anti-user practices that curb our freedoms with our devices.
I foresee that trend mostly remaining as it is in regards to consoles as well (and IoT devices), outside of projects like Steam Deck. But then again, I'm still bummed out that it wasn't possible for me to install Linux on my PS4 and use it as a development box (since updates explicitly fixed any vulnerabilities that would allow for that), because its form factor was great.
Hell, it's probably just a matter of time until PCs and laptops are sold with locked down bootloader and only run Windows or whatever other manufacturer sanctioned/mandated OS would be included.
* Export to desktop platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, UWP, and BSD.
* Export to mobile platforms: iOS and Android.
* Consoles: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One via third-party providers
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
They mention a few other platforms where 3rd parties have implemented commercial compatibility libraries, but Godot is much bigger in scale & scope, and nobody's done the legwork on that.