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I switched to Godot from Unity. Ya I lasted about 2 months and now I am back to Unity. Really depends on what you are doing but Godot has tons of bugs and it

by jarsin 8y ago

I switched to Godot from Unity. Ya I lasted about 2 months and now I am back to Unity. Really depends on what you are doing but Godot has tons of bugs and it just gets old real fast, assuming you actually want to build a game. And trying to fix those bugs is not so easy in a lot of cases. Obviously depends on what you are doing though. Switching from Unity to Unreal or vice versa is a wash imo as both those engines have proven themselves. Godot hasn't and still has a much longer way to go than the fanboys will have you believe. Maybe someday for some types of projects but I just don't see it ever having all the conveniences of Unity or Unreal.

Jach 8y ago
What sorts of bugs did you encounter? (Not looking for full bug reports, just a flavor...) I've only toyed with each of them so far so I haven't really found all the gotchas but Godot's the only one I want to spend more time with. It also seemed to fit my mental model of how I want to build a game better than Unity did. But as I said, I just toyed with them, so I'm interested in hearing critical feedback.
- backpropaganda 8y ago
  I got unstable FPS when I used a KinematicBody2D and ran the game in-editor. This bug has tens of reports over 2 years, and needless to say, renders the engine impossible to work with. To be fair, it got fixed in master a month ago, but there's no reason to believe that this would be a one-off. In my opinion, the project is trying too hard to add fancy features instead of stabilizing and bugfixing core features. Not a fan of the contribution model as well, in which they basically accept all PRs and then fix the bugs later. They claim that it's faster than using regression tests or using a more thorough reviewing process.
- jarsin 8y ago
  The PBR shader has too many features and I'm convinced they all have "math" bugs. I can just drop a model into unreal or unity from substance painter and it looks close enough. Not so with Godot. Lots of random Physics launches where out of nowhere my character is launching up into the air. Random screen stuttering on a scene with no geometry and just basic movement code in the physics update on a gtx 1080 system. Those are the bigger annoying ones but the more you hang out in the community you come to see there are tons of bugs in just about every system. You have to fix them yourself, work around them, or hope someone smarter than you fixes them. Most big bugs are stuck in the "hope someone fixes them" stage.
dkersten 8y ago
I spent a bit of time with Godot earlier this year and had a similar experience. I also found a lot of stuff (especially for 3D) undocumented or only very lightly documented, making learning pretty hard. Finally, the editor has UX problems: the layout and workflow is inconsistent and confusing (for example, Carl-s saves the scene always, if you’re editing a resource then you have to manually click a save icon because Carl-s doesn’t save it). Also, gdnative is/was still much too early to use in earnest, so a lot of the potential wasn’t yet fully realised (but strides were being made and those issues will be fixed if they aren’t already). I also had a ton of difficulty getting simple 2D tile maps to work properly (y sorting issues, performance issues) and the tile editor is quite lacking (you can import Tiled maps though, but I had some problems with that too). Finally, there were a few issues in the issue tracker where the devs seemed very dismissive of problems people were having. While I’m sure it’s just because developer time is limited and they need to prioritise, but it came across very ”I don’t have this problem so it’s not a problem” which left a bad taste... With all that negativity aside, Godot does a lot of things well and seems to be picking up steam. I really like the scene tree system (although I’m much more interested in Unity’s brand new ECS and job system than Godots OOP approach, personally, but I’m a functional programmer at heart) and I learned a lot I out physically based rendering thanks to Godot <3 But the developer experience is very sub-par compared to Unity (which has a very smooth onboarding experience) or Unreal. I hope the devs dedicate some time to UX, because Godot would benefit greatly from it and now while it’s gaining traction is a good time to address those issues. Godot has a lot of potential and is a fantastic project.

by jarsin 8y ago

Jach 8y ago

What sorts of bugs did you encounter? (Not looking for full bug reports, just a flavor...) I've only toyed with each of them so far so I haven't really found all the gotchas but Godot's the only one I want to spend more time with. It also seemed to fit my mental model of how I want to build a game better than Unity did. But as I said, I just toyed with them, so I'm interested in hearing critical feedback.

backpropaganda 8y ago
I got unstable FPS when I used a KinematicBody2D and ran the game in-editor. This bug has tens of reports over 2 years, and needless to say, renders the engine impossible to work with. To be fair, it got fixed in master a month ago, but there's no reason to believe that this would be a one-off. In my opinion, the project is trying too hard to add fancy features instead of stabilizing and bugfixing core features. Not a fan of the contribution model as well, in which they basically accept all PRs and then fix the bugs later. They claim that it's faster than using regression tests or using a more thorough reviewing process.
jarsin 8y ago
The PBR shader has too many features and I'm convinced they all have "math" bugs. I can just drop a model into unreal or unity from substance painter and it looks close enough. Not so with Godot. Lots of random Physics launches where out of nowhere my character is launching up into the air. Random screen stuttering on a scene with no geometry and just basic movement code in the physics update on a gtx 1080 system. Those are the bigger annoying ones but the more you hang out in the community you come to see there are tons of bugs in just about every system. You have to fix them yourself, work around them, or hope someone smarter than you fixes them. Most big bugs are stuck in the "hope someone fixes them" stage.

dkersten 8y ago

I spent a bit of time with Godot earlier this year and had a similar experience. I also found a lot of stuff (especially for 3D) undocumented or only very lightly documented, making learning pretty hard. Finally, the editor has UX problems: the layout and workflow is inconsistent and confusing (for example, Carl-s saves the scene always, if you’re editing a resource then you have to manually click a save icon because Carl-s doesn’t save it). Also, gdnative is/was still much too early to use in earnest, so a lot of the potential wasn’t yet fully realised (but strides were being made and those issues will be fixed if they aren’t already). I also had a ton of difficulty getting simple 2D tile maps to work properly (y sorting issues, performance issues) and the tile editor is quite lacking (you can import Tiled maps though, but I had some problems with that too). Finally, there were a few issues in the issue tracker where the devs seemed very dismissive of problems people were having. While I’m sure it’s just because developer time is limited and they need to prioritise, but it came across very ”I don’t have this problem so it’s not a problem” which left a bad taste... With all that negativity aside, Godot does a lot of things well and seems to be picking up steam. I really like the scene tree system (although I’m much more interested in Unity’s brand new ECS and job system than Godots OOP approach, personally, but I’m a functional programmer at heart) and I learned a lot I out physically based rendering thanks to Godot <3 But the developer experience is very sub-par compared to Unity (which has a very smooth onboarding experience) or Unreal. I hope the devs dedicate some time to UX, because Godot would benefit greatly from it and now while it’s gaining traction is a good time to address those issues. Godot has a lot of potential and is a fantastic project.