7 ms·

Godot doesn't get much interest from AAA developers because typically they are interested in shipping on consoles, and it's impossible to support the current cr

Godot doesn't get much interest from AAA developers because typically they are interested in shipping on consoles, and it's impossible to support the current crop of locked-down proprietary consoles in a free and open source engine. Despite this I am actually very surprised at the speed that Godot has accumulated features. I think we will start to see it shape up a lot more when Vulkan support becomes first class. The culture change is happening, give it time.

crazysim 8y ago
Impossible? There's a company offering porting of Godot games to consoles. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
- meditate 8y ago
  Sure you can port it, but as it stands that code will never be mainlined. Meaning it will be mostly impossible for AAA developers to come together to improve it.
ndnxhs 8y ago
Impossible because its too hard or impossible because legally you can't?
pjmlp 8y ago
Consoles never were open after 1983's crash, actually that is what saved them from the dumpster like quality from copy-cats on other platforms.
- shmerl 8y ago
  > actually that is what saved them from the dumpster like quality Did it? Lot's of gamers see consoles as something that holds developers back from using better hardware, since they need to target 5 year old systems. Quality both artistic and technical isn't something consoles can claim to be leading in. And clearly, "consolization" in its various forms isn't something gamers appreciate, when it spills out into PC gaming.
  - qplex 8y ago
    Sometimes it's nice to have a limited canvas to work on. For example in demoscene the art is to make these old consoles or computers do wonderful things that seem impossible on such limited resources.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      Sure, you can make good art with minimal tools. But consoles for a long time were not after good art (in its various meanings), but after mass market. So art suffered, same as technical side of things. My point is, consoles don't have any claim for higher quality in all meanings of the word.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        GDC attedees and IGDA members happen to think otherwise.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    On the contrary, professional game developers love game consoles, precisily because they have a stable platform to target for at least 5 years, instead of dealing with each customer being a special case. And that in spite of some bad apples still going through the gates, the large majority of flappy bird clones never makes.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      Easier to work with doesn't make it higher quality overall. General perception of console games is exactly reduced quality, in the sense of art and games mechanics (due to mass market appeal and controller oriented design) and in technical aspects simply due to outdated hardware. Incumbent consoles are trying to dig themselves out of this perception now, but they got it very deservedly.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    There's a big difference between "not using cutting edge hardware" and "unplayable games sold at full price that become literal trash before they're ever even opened". The average game on a console is going to be higher quality than the average game on PC because the average game on PC has to include the game I made in Visual Basic 6 when I was in high school. With no gatekeeper ensuring basic quality, my VB6 game is every bit as legitimate of a game as Battlefield 5. They both hold the title of "PC Game", but only one of them could ever be called "Xbox Game" because Microsoft would never allow my game on their console.
dkersten 8y ago
In my (admitedly limited) experience with Godot, I think one reason it doesn’t get more interest from AAA is that the 3D support doesn’t perform that well and isn’t so solid yet. It will improve though and they are actively working on it. On a more fundamental level, Godot’s design internally isn’t very data-oriented (lots of indirection in their data structures), while even unity has switched (or is in the process of doing so) to a data-oriented design (thanks in part to Mike Acton working for them now, it seems), this means that Godot will always leave some performance on the table, since cache-efficeincy is very important for high end games. It can be improved, of course, but it will take time and Godot devs are (rightly!) averse to changing core internal stuff. About this time last year, I wanted to make a simple little 2D platform game in Godot and my experience was mixed. Some stuff was really easy and pleasant, some stuff was middling and then other stuff was frustrating enough that I gave up: for example, I had to spend an entire day just so I could get sprites correctly sorted so that tilemap tiles and objects that were in front of the player would be drawn in front and those that were behind were drawn behind. Basic stuff. There’s an option to enable for this (y-sort) but it did not work without a bunch of unintuitive tweaking. The docuentation didn’t help, reddit couldn’t help, their discord couldn’t help and I wasted a lot of time on it. Having said that, I have high hopes for Godot and I do think it has a bright future, but it has a ways to go. I’ve even made some (very small) contributions to the gdnative c++ library, so its not like I’m just complaining ;) My point is that Godot doesn’t get much interest for more reasons than just consoles (there’s commercial support for porting available). But, as you say, the culture change is happening, it just needs time.

crazysim 8y ago

Impossible? There's a company offering porting of Godot games to consoles. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...

meditate 8y ago
Sure you can port it, but as it stands that code will never be mainlined. Meaning it will be mostly impossible for AAA developers to come together to improve it.

ndnxhs 8y ago

Impossible because its too hard or impossible because legally you can't?

pjmlp 8y ago

Consoles never were open after 1983's crash, actually that is what saved them from the dumpster like quality from copy-cats on other platforms.

shmerl 8y ago
> actually that is what saved them from the dumpster like quality Did it? Lot's of gamers see consoles as something that holds developers back from using better hardware, since they need to target 5 year old systems. Quality both artistic and technical isn't something consoles can claim to be leading in. And clearly, "consolization" in its various forms isn't something gamers appreciate, when it spills out into PC gaming.
- qplex 8y ago
  Sometimes it's nice to have a limited canvas to work on. For example in demoscene the art is to make these old consoles or computers do wonderful things that seem impossible on such limited resources.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Sure, you can make good art with minimal tools. But consoles for a long time were not after good art (in its various meanings), but after mass market. So art suffered, same as technical side of things. My point is, consoles don't have any claim for higher quality in all meanings of the word.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      GDC attedees and IGDA members happen to think otherwise.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  On the contrary, professional game developers love game consoles, precisily because they have a stable platform to target for at least 5 years, instead of dealing with each customer being a special case. And that in spite of some bad apples still going through the gates, the large majority of flappy bird clones never makes.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Easier to work with doesn't make it higher quality overall. General perception of console games is exactly reduced quality, in the sense of art and games mechanics (due to mass market appeal and controller oriented design) and in technical aspects simply due to outdated hardware. Incumbent consoles are trying to dig themselves out of this perception now, but they got it very deservedly.
- freehunter 8y ago
  There's a big difference between "not using cutting edge hardware" and "unplayable games sold at full price that become literal trash before they're ever even opened". The average game on a console is going to be higher quality than the average game on PC because the average game on PC has to include the game I made in Visual Basic 6 when I was in high school. With no gatekeeper ensuring basic quality, my VB6 game is every bit as legitimate of a game as Battlefield 5. They both hold the title of "PC Game", but only one of them could ever be called "Xbox Game" because Microsoft would never allow my game on their console.

dkersten 8y ago

In my (admitedly limited) experience with Godot, I think one reason it doesn’t get more interest from AAA is that the 3D support doesn’t perform that well and isn’t so solid yet. It will improve though and they are actively working on it. On a more fundamental level, Godot’s design internally isn’t very data-oriented (lots of indirection in their data structures), while even unity has switched (or is in the process of doing so) to a data-oriented design (thanks in part to Mike Acton working for them now, it seems), this means that Godot will always leave some performance on the table, since cache-efficeincy is very important for high end games. It can be improved, of course, but it will take time and Godot devs are (rightly!) averse to changing core internal stuff. About this time last year, I wanted to make a simple little 2D platform game in Godot and my experience was mixed. Some stuff was really easy and pleasant, some stuff was middling and then other stuff was frustrating enough that I gave up: for example, I had to spend an entire day just so I could get sprites correctly sorted so that tilemap tiles and objects that were in front of the player would be drawn in front and those that were behind were drawn behind. Basic stuff. There’s an option to enable for this (y-sort) but it did not work without a bunch of unintuitive tweaking. The docuentation didn’t help, reddit couldn’t help, their discord couldn’t help and I wasted a lot of time on it. Having said that, I have high hopes for Godot and I do think it has a bright future, but it has a ways to go. I’ve even made some (very small) contributions to the gdnative c++ library, so its not like I’m just complaining ;) My point is that Godot doesn’t get much interest for more reasons than just consoles (there’s commercial support for porting available). But, as you say, the culture change is happening, it just needs time.