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Godot 4.0 Stable

by Jowsey on 3/1/23, 2:41 PM with 103 comments

• by et1337 on 3/1/23, 3:10 PM

  I’ve been playing with this recently and it’s made game development fun for me again. The prospect of creating an account, signing a bunch of EULAs, installing an Electron ”version manager” so I can install a massive engine, hook it up to a massive IDE, only to have it all instantly crash just about extinguished any spark I had left for game development.

  But Godot is like a breath of fresh air. Lightweight, beautiful abstractions, with a lot of horsepower to back it up. It crashes as much as the competitors if not more, but man is it fun!

  Even the Godot subreddit feels like a breath of fresh air compared to /r/gamedev. People are just having fun.

• by nightowl_games on 3/1/23, 3:44 PM

  I've been using Godot 3 for 2+ years. It's great. There's some downsides to Godot for sure, but I think they will all be resolved over time.

  I could work on Godot for the rest of my life. It brings me great joy to contribute to the engine. I would never feel comfortable writing Unity code again, as I do not want any other commercial interests injected into my artwork, my hobbies and my craft.

  Godot is truly a public good.

• by TheCraiggers on 3/1/23, 3:05 PM

  > 1,500 individual contributors across engine and docs.

  I feel like this is an outstanding achievement. I've never contributed to Godot, but somebody must be doing something right and making people feel welcome. I may have to check it out.

• by goffi on 3/1/23, 4:01 PM

  Congrats to all the people involved, it's really great to see such a FOSS tool!

  How is it for app development? I've seen that they have started to showreels for apps (https://godotengine.org/article/announcing-godot-2022-showre...) and it's quite impressive. I'm wondering if it can be a good alternative to stuff like Qt/Qt Quick for rapid prototyping, or even production app.

  The easy export to multiple platforms is a really an interesting point. I'm mostly wondering if it can handle correctly stuff like accessibility, desktop integration, and if it's good at handling texts (Unicode, RTL, etc).

• by segphault on 3/1/23, 3:35 PM

  I tried one of the beta releases and successfully migrated a small toy project that I had been working on in Unity. It's remarkable how much Godot has improved. The new 2D tilemap editor in 4.0 is really good. I was also really happy to see that the type system in the Godot scripting language is a lot more comprehensive now.

  It's pretty remarkable how much faster and cleaner the Godot developer experience is compared to Unity. I feel like a spend a huge amount of my Unity development time waiting for the compiler and fighting with the tools. In Godot, the development iteration loop is much faster. I can't really speak to 3D capabilities, but for 2D projects I'm totally sold on Godot and see no reason to ever go back to Unity.

• by seanw444 on 3/1/23, 4:47 PM

  Godot is one of those pinnacle FOSS projects that just totally impresses me, especially given the state its in now, with 4.0. It's so cool that a loose community of "The People" have created things like Godot, OBS, and Blender. What a time to be alive.

• by owlbynight on 3/1/23, 4:38 PM

  I'm 41 and just getting into game development. I've been kind of weighing my options for awhile, and waiting for Godot 4 to come out. This is rad.

  The only complaint I have is that the scale of the GUI is ridiculous. It's not like I'm running some crazy resolution. Why is it so small? Why hasn't it been complained into options to scale it? I literally cannot read the project creation interface without using Windows zoom.

• by _phf6 on 3/1/23, 5:12 PM

  I really tried to like Godot, using it to make a node-based logic editor. But GDScript is incredibly bad at handling data, as well as having terrible editor support (and the built in editor is bad), which made things incredibly difficult. It doesn't even have first class functions or support for doing multiple HTTP requests at once to a single endpoint if you don't make multiple callback functions, one for each request. And the signals system, allegedly meant to reduce spaghetti, only increased it. The inability to put multiple scripts on a object and use of inheritance over composition only made things worse.

  I tried the Rust integration but the API was very rough around the edges and there was huge amounts of unsafe where I really wasn't sure how I was meant to verify its usage.

  In the end I switched to Bevy+egui. Progress is good, typing is strong, and while some things are more difficult, I'm not tearing my hair out about basic things.

• by bogwog on 3/1/23, 3:12 PM

  > 4 years of development.

  For some perspective, console generations are usually around 6-7 years. Given their stated AAA aspirations, I wonder what the future development process will actually look like, because another dark age like from Godot 3 to 4 would be a deal breaker. It's easy to say "future 4.x releases will come with a much faster cadence", but it's also easy to decide that something else absolutely needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in a multi-year effort.

  But negativity aside, finally having a stable release is great. Godot is a really nice engine, and definitely a huge step up from the existing commercial engines in terms of usability.

• by dang on 3/1/23, 3:25 PM

  Related (about this release—there are too many Godot threads to list):

  What's new in C# for Godot 4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944340 - Feb 2023 (105 comments)

  Godot 4.0 RC 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805594 - Feb 2023 (8 comments)

  Godot 4 Release Candidate 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709249 - Feb 2023 (27 comments)

  Godot 4.0 beta 16: Initial .NET 7 support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547637 - Jan 2023 (33 comments)

  Godot 4.0 beta 9 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34052510 - Dec 2022 (15 comments)

  Godot Engine Release Management: 4.0 and beyond - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33793281 - Nov 2022 (43 comments)

  Movie Maker mode in Godot 4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33598256 - Nov 2022 (8 comments)

  Godot 4 Beta 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32856034 - Sept 2022 (110 comments)

  Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571893 - Aug 2022 (110 comments)

  Godot 4.0 development enters feature freeze ahead of the first beta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265429 - July 2022 (118 comments)

  Fog Volumes arrive in Godot 4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32003065 - July 2022 (44 comments)

• by fhd2 on 3/1/23, 3:34 PM

  Been working with Godot for a couple of months now and can highly recommend it. Maybe it's just the mental model that matches mine well, but I have to spend very little time reading things up - in general stuff turns out to work how I think it should, and it's not more complicated than it has to be. Quite different from my experience with Unity.

  I'll probably steer clear of 4.0 for now though - for my non-AAA needs 3.x (3.6 will receive LTS if I understood it correctly) is quite sufficient, and it looks like I'd have to do quite a bit of yak shaving to switch.

• by milliams on 3/1/23, 5:05 PM

  The release announcement blog post with all the information is at https://godotengine.org/article/godot-4-0-sets-sail/.

  It might make more sense to use that link instead.

• by shdon on 3/1/23, 3:19 PM

  Having looked at the migration guide from 3.x to 4.x, I am rather worried at the large amount of stuff that needs to be changed to port projects from 3.x to 4.x. There's an automated conversion tool for parts of it, but there's so much that it doesn't handle.

  My enthusiasm waned quite quickly when I read that. The huge amount of breaking changes means that few projects or tutorials are likely to get updated and adoption of this new version is likely to be much slower as it's like having to build the ecosystem up from scratch.

  As I'm about to start my first larger Godot project, I was initially waiting for 4 so I could work in that (and looking forward to it), now I'm going to have to seriously consider staying on 3.x if I want to get a good start.

  Definitely not the case that you can just take a 3.x project, load it into 4.0, spend a few minutes fixing some bugs or deprecation warnings and then enjoy new features or performance enhancements.

• by Temporary_31337 on 3/1/23, 3:06 PM

  How have people found the learning curve and debugging? My son did a game with it, but once we started trying custom stuff it wasn’t clear where the code for some things was - some things were in the scene some in the shapes etc. I.e. it’s crazy easy to start with but gets a lot harder as you go?

• by EntrePrescott on 3/1/23, 5:35 PM

  Anyone have experience with IK and skeletal animation of rigged 3D models on Godot 4? Last time I checked (back in the 3.x days), it seemed like Godot 3.x was lacking in that area (as opposed to 2D animation) but that they planned to improve 3D animation in Godot 4. I'd be interested to know how viable it now is in Godot 4 compared to other engines.

• by birracerveza on 3/1/23, 3:03 PM

  Amazing engine that just keeps getting better and better.

  Congratulations on the release!

• by bodge5000 on 3/1/23, 3:10 PM

  I've been looking forward to this for so long and when it finally comes I'm on an overnight train in Vietnam (I purposely didn't bring a laptop for the trip). Still, makes mo so happy to see all that hard work payoff, solid job from the team and all contributors

• by ydnaclementine on 3/1/23, 3:16 PM

  Any recommended tutorials? Preferably text/books over videos

• by raajg on 3/1/23, 3:47 PM

  Been using the RC build over Godot 3 and have been pleasantly surprised. There are several quality of life improvements - the biggest one being that you can set default font and just change font sizes without having to create a new theme for reach node - this is probably my most used new feature!!

  Wonderful job Godot team, and huge congrats on the 4.0 release

• by MintPaw on 3/1/23, 3:09 PM

  Release notes is a 404.

• by pentagrama on 3/1/23, 7:46 PM

  I usually prefer just read the release notes of software updates, but in this case, a video showing and explaining the new features is a great companion https://youtu.be/chXAjMQrcZk

• by norwalkbear on 3/1/23, 4:08 PM

  If someone builds a unity to Godot converter, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

• by raincole on 3/1/23, 3:53 PM

  A hyporthetical question: if you're going to contribute to an open source game engine, which one would it be and why? Godot? Bevy? Others?

• by simjnd on 3/1/23, 5:14 PM

  What's the difference between the new "automatic mesh LOD" in Godot and Nanite in Unreal 5?

• by wlesieutre on 3/1/23, 6:09 PM

  To the dead comment asking about "mono" builds, they have a .NET runtime so you can use C#

• by jti107 on 3/2/23, 12:04 AM

  this is awesome...i've started dabbling in game dev and was messing around with unreal 5. i will have to give this a shot

• by amelius on 3/1/23, 4:26 PM

  I'm betting we will see StableDiffusion models that can create 3D graphics assets, and basically everyone can create a game (no artists or programmers required).

• by ralusek on 3/1/23, 3:48 PM

  Unpopular Opinion: Godot should make JavaScript/Typescript its scripting languages.