from Hacker News

Godot 4 Beta 1

by f47il on 9/15/22, 6:04 PM with 110 comments

• by malikNF on 9/15/22, 7:41 PM

  from the article,

  >>As much as we love exciting new features, we also want to see people create games on the full spectrum of devices for everyone to enjoy.

  This is one of the main attitudes of the Godot team I really appreciate a lot. It might be easy for people in more developed nations to upgrade their hardware every few years, but there's people still playing games running on computers from 2002 and before. I used to know of a player who used to play (an old MMORPG) games on a computer he aimed a table fan at to keep it cool. The whole casing was open, it was kinna funny to look at it and it had hardware he got as a birthday gift more than 10 years ago. He played that old MMORPG because newer games wouldn't even start on that old thing. But most people who played that MMO were in the same boat, it was one of the very few ones they could run.

  The requirements for some of the games coming out these days is sometimes so insane a lot of people from around the world are unable to play them. I always found it funny how we had so much developer time wasted on supporting ie6 because a small percentage of people were unable to upgrade their browsers, but when it comes to gaming, all bets were off and you are now expected to spend a few grand a year on upgrading your computer to play newer games. And don't get me started on the bandwidth costs to play some of the new games.

• by runevault on 9/15/22, 7:40 PM

  I played with Godot back in the early 3.x timeframe (3.1? 3.2?) and then fell away and spent some time with Unity. But between some of Unity's missteps and Godot getting dotnet 6 support it is time to give it another go, plus a bunch of nice changes to gdscript that might make it something I'm okay with using (functions are first class citizens now unlike before where you just passed the name of the function as a string which always felt incredibly gross).

  Though based on the discord conversation there are still a lot of bumps even in the beta so I would not expect smooth sailing yet, but lets see if it is any good.

  For anyone interested, the main documentation on their site is still pointing at 3.x. If you want the docs for 4.0 start here

  https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/index.html

• by dopu on 9/15/22, 6:39 PM

  HN hug of death? godotengine.org is offline for me at the moment. Regardless, really looking forward to trying it out! Here it is on the wayback machine:

  https://web.archive.org/web/20220915181526/https://godotengi...

• by cmdrk on 9/15/22, 6:47 PM

  Fantastic news. I'm really looking forward to Godot 4.0 exposing more of the ENet wrapper into GDScript etc. I've been writing a game server in Erlang and very much looking forward to offering ENet as an option in addition to WebSockets!

• by lbotos on 9/15/22, 9:05 PM

  Early pandemic I was playing around with making a network shooter in godot but I got hung up on a good way to make a shared lib for the client/server "projects". Anyone solve that or have tips? It seemed like I either needed to make a mono repo and toggle the build for client=true but I really wanted to make 3 repos, client, server, and game-core-lib. Would love tips/guides if you have them!

• by Reubend on 9/15/22, 6:49 PM

  I think writing their own physics engine might be wrong way to go here. I understand that Bullet leaves a lot to be desired, but my instinct is that the complexity from their own engine will leave a lot of edge case bugs that need to be ironed out over time, and that games using their own physics engine will suffer from a lot more quirks in the meantime.

• by keyle on 9/15/22, 9:55 PM

  I'm very excited for Godot 4 beta.

  I shipped games on Godot 3 and the idea of having Vulkan and better culling is really attractive.

  When I tried the alpha fairly early on the editor was completely unusable on macOS.

• by sylware on 9/15/22, 7:42 PM

  For the elf/linux target, I hope the build containers have a really, really old glibc (dunno which version it is) and the "-static-libgcc" and "-static-libstdc++" are defaults.

• by jokoon on 9/15/22, 7:37 PM

  I tried the gdnative thing and implemented a few classes, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference with gdextension.

• by cridenour on 9/15/22, 6:38 PM

  This is great.

  I've been building my game on the Godot 4 alphas and the improvements in networking and rendering have more than made up for any instability or keeping up with changes. That said, more stability will be welcome and a focus on bug fixing instead of feature proposals will be key to a strong 4.0 release.

• by intelVISA on 9/15/22, 9:43 PM

  Been meaning to pick up Godot one of these days, how does it fare on the wasm/webGPU front?

• by ummonk on 9/15/22, 7:03 PM

  Impressive stuff. Starting to have the table stakes features that would need for a modern game.

• by devd00d on 9/16/22, 7:27 AM

  I love everything Godot. My first experience with 3d was with Opengl 15 years ago and seeing what is now possible (for free) is mindblowing.

• by adamrezich on 9/15/22, 10:06 PM

  haven't used Godot in a couple years but it's good to see the progress on their tile system for 2D games! it was terrible last I checked, yet pretty crucial for making many kinds of simple 2D games

• by taejavu on 9/15/22, 11:49 PM

  Does anyone know if there's a build for MacOS yet?

• by abledon on 9/15/22, 7:49 PM

  Logo change in Godot 5 ?

• by pwdisswordfish0 on 9/15/22, 7:14 PM

  It would be nice if we brought the rule back where it's against HN guidelines to post submissions for every new version of some software. Every Godot thread ends up with the same comments posted, none of them particularly interesting or insightful. And in this particular case, it's not even an official release; it's just a beta!