by makepanic on 1/29/20, 11:56 AM with 138 comments
by zubspace on 1/29/20, 3:52 PM
++ Open License and friendly community.
++ The scene graph (node tree / prefabs) is well done, better than Unity. You can easily switch between scenes (Prefabs) through tabs and convert subtrees to separate scenes. Nesting scenes works really well.
++ The inbuilt scripting documentation is great.
- C# is not fully there, yet. No Visual studio integration. Debugging through VSCode is a pain. WebAssembly Exports are not optimized yet. That's why I sticked with GDScript.
+ GDScript is a nice language with optional type hinting. But refactoring can mostly be done through search/replace.
++ Windows and HTML/WebGL exports are super fast. I did not have problems since the RC.
- The inbuilt editor for GDScripts is ok. But I'm missing my VIM shortcuts...
- Arrays, dictionaries are not generic. Enums are not typesafe either. Bit me a few times.
- You cannot inspect the scene in the editor visually while debugging. This is what I miss the most coming from unity. Some things are really hard to debug this way, for example if you use procedural generation.
- 2D coords starting at the top left corner of the screen and increasing right/down is really confusing. If the player jumps, y goes down. It's a bit strange.
- I'm a bit afraid regarding the +5000 open issues on github. I wonder, how they will handle that in the future...
by electronstudio on 1/29/20, 3:43 PM
Recently I tried Godot because I was looking for something simple I could teach to kids[2], and I was amazed how easy it makes game creation. I made these games with no experience in just a couple of days!
https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_racing
https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_space
GDscript is great. It's similar enough to Python that kids who know Python won't notice much difference, and it actually simplifies things for beginners, e.g. you can use objects without the need to define classes because they are created automatically when you create a script.
Godot is still a little rough around the edges, e.g. not everything has keyboard shortcuts, sometimes it crashes, some of the built in tools like map editor are very fiddly to use. But it's open source so I'm sure they will be fixed eventually (and if they aren't I can always do it myself.) The only major issue I can see for the future of Godot is the lack of exporters for Xbox, Playstation and Switch.
by shafyy on 1/29/20, 2:58 PM
(I'm not affiliated with Godot, I just use it and love it)
by arminiusreturns on 1/29/20, 2:27 PM
After Epic originally promised to make linux a first class citizen, I went all in ue4, but they lied and went back on all those promises, and I have since moved to a completely open source gamedev pipeline and I think it's the future.
For example, think about how much mods make or break game longetivity and communities. If valve hadnt given us world hammer, there would be no counterstrike, no tf2, no garrys mod, no age of chivalry and ergo no chivalry medieval warfare. The residual effects of modding capabilities are huge, and having formats that are easy to work with with normal tooling (like gltf) mean open source gaming in a game engine like godot (or a few others, armory3d is another) could be a sleeping giant just in the early stages of waking.
by diegoperini on 1/29/20, 2:21 PM
by blensor on 1/29/20, 12:51 PM
by nnq on 1/29/20, 1:48 PM
But which engine... that's an open question, and I'm not that fond of Unity :)
by jokoon on 1/29/20, 7:26 PM
It also seems to support c++ as "gdnative", although it requires another compiler to link against godot's binaries. It seems awkward because you still need to use the godot editor, and there is still a lot of interfacing to write.
It seems like a good alternative to unity, but in the end, all I want is an engine, not a "framework" or some awkward scene editor with some kind of Node hierarchy/interface.
I could say the same thing about UE4. I hear everywhere that's it's the place to go, that "everybody uses it and it's the norm in the industry if you want to make a game from scratch", but the reality is that those frameworks are too big and too feature rich. It sounds like they want to attract young developers to lock them into those awkward frameworks, because they advertise it as being full-featured engines, but small developers might not really need to focus on bleeding edge rendering, so it doesn't make sense.
I know there are engines like Ogre3D, but I would rather spend time learning an actual universal graphics API that works on all hardware, which has more value on a resume, and I can just use what I need. All other things like audio, animation, inputs, physics, etc are available as C++ libraries.
Those frameworks are saying "see? you can make your own game with those tools!", but when you actually learn how a computer works, and know how to write code, you realize you want to avoid those frameworks because they conceal too much from the programmer, and usually you don't want a developer to not understand what the framework is doing. I guess this is why people have a problem with certain object-oriented practices and abstraction.
EDIT:
Here is a nice video which benchmarks unity against a simple, very similar from-scratch equivalent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y
by cdiamand on 1/29/20, 5:02 PM
It's an ascii roguelike with a neat 3d aesthetic.
Godot was a pleasure to install and play around with it. I recommend taking a look!
by somebodythere on 1/29/20, 7:08 PM
by edf13 on 1/29/20, 2:28 PM
by xwowsersx on 1/29/20, 5:27 PM
by disease on 1/29/20, 3:15 PM
I can't understate how much of a big deal the growing support for c# is. Both for non-game devs who want to dip their feet in making games and also luring in current Unity developers.
by woollysammoth on 1/29/20, 7:05 PM
by Kiro on 1/29/20, 3:05 PM
by WillYouFinish on 1/31/20, 7:55 AM
by eli_gottlieb on 1/30/20, 2:35 AM
by rcarmo on 1/29/20, 3:18 PM
by malkia on 1/29/20, 10:13 PM
by phn on 1/29/20, 2:00 PM
by legostormtroopr on 1/30/20, 12:23 AM
by ncmncm on 1/29/20, 10:45 PM
Hint for people posting release announcements: you could save a great many people quite a lot of time, cumulatively, with just a single short sentence in the first paragraph of your announcement. You probably would pick up some new participants who would have given up in disgust before they could discover what the hell the thing is.