from Hacker News

Stop Waiting for Godot

by polm23 on 8/30/21, 2:50 AM with 127 comments

• by WillDaSilva on 8/30/21, 4:03 AM

  The post title was a tad misleading - I got the impression that it was saying that Godot isn't ready and we shouldn't wait for it to become ready. I suppose it got my attention by being like that, and that was the point. Maybe it'd've been better as "Stop Waiting for Godot - Game Jam".

  Happy to see Terry Cavanagh is trying Godot. I love Super Hexagon and VVVVVV, and am planning to play Dicey Dungeons in the future. Looking forward to see what he makes.

• by reanimus on 8/30/21, 10:22 AM

  I have a friend who's been trying to go all-in on Godot but decided recently to switch over to something else, largely due to ongoing issues with its lighting system. When toying with it, he encountered poor lighting overall and some particularly counterintuitive behavior with the (rather simplistic) lighting system.

  For example, a simple scene with a wall intersecting the floor and a light placed on one side. In this scenario, you get weird light spilling around the edge onto the vertex where the wall meets the ground (see [0] and [1]). There's also poor handling of multiple light sources; if you cast a shadow and place a light directly on top of the shadow area, it's impossible to displace the shadow (see [2]). These sorts of things are very noticeable, and part of the recent work that they've just released was supposed to address this. However, these examples came from the most recent release, which made my friend begin considering other options with more robust lighting.

  [0] https://imgur.com/rsxjV5u [1] https://imgur.com/kOzKQnL [2] https://imgur.com/NH9ZViP

• by john_moscow on 8/30/21, 5:35 AM

  I've recently checked out Godot and it turned out to be easier than I expected. I followed this series of tutorials [0] (I found it most palatable at 2x speed, occasionally going to 1x for critical parts).

  Took me about an hour altogether to get pretty productive at making a non-trivial game. The engine is cool and takes care of a lot of routine things, like physics, collisions, and organizing things hierarchically.

  [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvPTSZl2WCc

• by brundolf on 8/30/21, 6:45 AM

  Would love to see Godot become the Blender of game engines: a genuinely professional-grade tool despite being free and open-source

  Unity, its closest peer, is a piece of crap in a lot of ways. But it's a piece of crap that has a lot of important features. I look forward to the day nobody ever has to reach for Unity again.

• by tetha on 8/30/21, 11:28 AM

  Hm, I've been trying to learn godot, but I kinda keep hitting walls I'm not sure how to navigate. I pretty much get the idea, for a simple platformer, you'd build your enemies, players and level elements as scenes, and then you use godot as a level editor to build your level, instantiating these scenes.

  However, I'm seriously struggling to think some different scenarios. For example, how to structure the application in order to have some procedurally generated contents for a level and how to add that into the godot structure.

  Or, another thing was I had some situations where it feels like I need to parametrize a packed scene with some other instances of a packed scene. Think of a toolbox filled with tools, which are again instances of other packed scenes. That grew into a really weird monster pushing paths of instances around, but became very unwieldy quickly.

  At that point I'm confused if I have a mental block because I'm thinking incorrectly about the problem, or if godot is not a good fit for stuff like that, or if there is a great way to structure this in godot.

  Dunno. Somewhat rambling, but maybe someone has some pointers there.

• by georgewsinger on 8/30/21, 5:32 AM

  SimulaVR (www.simulavr.com -- Linux VR Desktop ported to a portable VR headset) is built over Godot. We've ran through some bugs during the development process, but being able to alter the game engine's code on the fly has been really nice.

• by TaylorAlexander on 8/30/21, 4:23 AM

  There’s also an interface to use OpenAI Gym environments in Godot.

  https://github.com/lupoglaz/GodotAIGym

  I have succeeded in modifying the interface to send images to a version of Google’s DreamerV2 RL learner. I have a simple test environment I could publish.

  But I stalled because I kept getting a segmentation fault and I wasn’t up for debugging it. I have enough plumbing that it begins testing and makes it at most a few thousand cycles but this segfault eventually comes up.

  I think it would be very cool to be able to make a game in Godot and then train an agent to play it using DreamerV2 or similar. I’ve still not posted my sample files but if someone responds here saying they would like to see it, I will try to push it all to GitHub.

• by yann2 on 8/30/21, 6:33 AM

  I like the enthusiam godot is generating in kids or people new to complex programming environments. You can see the energy in the chatrooms, forums and subreddit. Really creative stuff from the younger crowd showing the tool is getting out of the way allowing them to express what they want quicker.

  Also suprising to me was seeing an app like Pixelorama built on top of godot. The fact they chose it over .net, java, gtk etc is pretty cool.

• by armchairhacker on 8/30/21, 4:34 AM

  I thought this was a reference to Godot 4. It’s been in development for a while but the latest stable is still 3.3.3

• by dwheeler on 8/30/21, 5:06 PM

  Cool!

  An alternative OSS 3D engine is Open 3D Engine (O3DE), more here: https://o3de.org/

  This is a new Linux Foundation project. (Full disclosure: I work for the LF, though I don't have any connection to O3DE.)

• by jchook on 8/30/21, 3:59 AM

  Truly wholesome hackathon invitation. Glad to see it got so much traction already.

• by jfcisco on 8/30/21, 9:10 AM

  Hoping this is what will make me really dive deep into Godot and game development in general

  For some reason, my brain has a hard time translating my ideas to scenes and nodes

• by SilverRed on 8/30/21, 6:48 AM

  It's been a loooong time since I last used godot. Did they get vulkan support in?

• by queuep on 8/30/21, 1:22 PM

  I remember reading about Godot but think it didn't work in my scenario which is: HTML5 Mobile compatible(in webbrowsers such as mobile Safari) Web sockets for communications (such as socket.io or signalr)

  Anyone knows if this is still the case? There seems to be a lot off stuff that you get off the shelf with Godot which I have to resort doing myself now, using Pixi.js

• by aphroz on 8/30/21, 4:11 AM

  I am working with Phaser 3 for my first 2D game, but I am looking forward learning Godot during this jam. This is probably why it's so hard for me to deliver something :)

• by pdinny on 8/30/21, 9:54 AM

  I feel clickbaited here. I was fully expecting some weird 'Waiting for Godot'/Beckettverse itch.io game. That said, maybe I'll join the jam!

• by snthd on 8/30/21, 11:24 AM

  Would love an open source godot-based board game emulator.

• by Wesxdz on 8/30/21, 12:52 PM

  Hey Terry, love Dicey Dungeons :) I think Godot is okay for simple things but GDScript ruins the whole engine for me. It's not a real language (which is antithetical to the whole idea of shared open source standards), you can't do things that matter with it, but you certainly have to waste time learning the syntax and trying.

• by _def on 8/31/21, 8:38 AM

  I love Terry's games and I always wanted to try and learn Godot. I'm in!

• by georgeecollins on 8/30/21, 4:06 AM

  I like Godot and have been using it lately to make simple Oculus Quest games. Does anyone know if you can release a Godot game on the Quest store? I know you can’t on the PlayStation store because of the open source license.

  Does anybody know if this applies to the Oculus store?

• by caniszczyk on 8/30/21, 3:26 PM

  Check out https://o3de.org if you're interested in open source game engines