from Hacker News

Godot founders had desperately hoped Unity wouldn't 'blow up'

by kruuuder on 9/6/24, 6:41 PM with 140 comments

  • by AdmiralAsshat on 9/6/24, 7:49 PM

    It makes some degree of sense. You might assume a bunch of refugees hitting your product would be good, but in my experience, people who transition voluntarily/gradually are more willing to adopt a new paradigm. However, people who are moving under duress (because their previous product suddenly vanished/went out-of-support/changed licensing) are generally less flexible. They haven't had time to adjust, and just want an apples-to-apples equivalent for the thing they are used to as quickly as possible, because they're trying to get back to work.

    Presumably they didn't want Godot to suddenly get an influx of help tickets or message forum posts that were all rephrasings of "This interface doesn't have a button exactly where I expect it from Unity. Godot sucks."

  • by omoikane on 9/6/24, 9:08 PM

    > "Pronounce it however you like."

    Godot pronunciation is documented at https://godotengine.org/press/

        Godot is named after the play Waiting for Godot, and is usually pronounced like in the play. Different languages have different pronunciations for Godot and we find it beautiful.
    But there used to be an extra line that recommends pronouncing it like "god-oh":

        For native English speakers, we recommend "GOD-oh"; the "t" is silent like in the French original.
    It was removed in favor of making the pronunciation non-prescriptive:

    https://github.com/godotengine/godot-website/pull/638

    https://github.com/godotengine/godot-website/commit/c9053182...

  • by jncfhnb on 9/6/24, 7:50 PM

    > Godot's limitations are fascinating in part because, as the pair stressed multiple times in our conversation, they're something technically savvy developers can solve themselves. Because Godot is open source, developers who want to add key features can fork the engine and modify it for themselves free of cost. That isn't possible with Unity or Unreal Engine.

    You can modify unreal. It’s source available.

  • by doctorpangloss on 9/6/24, 7:57 PM

    Stretching $8 million to do $2 BILLION of product development is the hard part.

    So is trying to make a game engine during the worst industry contraction since the collapse of Atari.

    Being open source is kind of saving them right now.

  • by calcsam on 9/6/24, 7:46 PM

    Founders rooting for their competitors to self-destruct is pretty rare in devtools.

  • by jayd16 on 9/6/24, 11:19 PM

    Unity's killer feature really is "edit while in Play mode." I miss it when in Unreal as well.

    That said, its really a double edged sword. Unity can turn into a buggy mess if you try to get too clever about mucking with domain reloads and such.

  • by goles on 9/6/24, 8:14 PM

  • by debo_ on 9/6/24, 7:32 PM

    I like how it was the Godot maintainers that ended up showing demonstrating their Unity.