6 ms·

I wonder if Godot has a chance of becoming the Blender of game engines. From the way it is growing it's starting to look like a real long-term possibility to me

I wonder if Godot has a chance of becoming the Blender of game engines. From the way it is growing it's starting to look like a real long-term possibility to me, especially for the smaller game studios.

throw_m239339 7y ago
It's all about the $$$ and the community. Blender started as a commercial project too. I was already using it in the 90's alongside POVRay. The good thing is unlike in the photography or the print industry there is no real industry wide vendor lock-in when it comes to formats in 3D, so it's always possible to create a challenger. Right now Godot isn't really on par with Unity, but it could become the de-facto game engine for Blender in the future if Godot allows deep integration with the former.
- brachi 7y ago
  > there is no real industry wide vendor lock-in when it comes to formats in 3D Mmm, Blender had a lot of problems having to reverse FBX from autodesk, which AFAIK is or was a de-facto standard. About open standards, I kinda hate xml, so I didn't like Collada much. I'm looking forward for knowing more about glTF[1]. Thankfully Blender 2.8 had the official add-on from the beginning.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    glTF was introduced by Khronos for WebGL, then thanks to Microsoft glTF 2.0 was born and became API agnostic. Khronos YouTube channel has lots of talks on the format.
PudgePacket 7y ago
I hope so! Though the Blender situation is a little different. Blenders main competition are paid software. While Unity and Unreal are technically paid too, many users can use them "for free" for the most part. Unity and Unreal are both foraying into non-gaming applications like Cinema, and whatever the word is for working with architectural programs/formats. Might be an opportunity for Godot to stay focused and gain mind share that way? I know Unity is under a bit of an upheaval right now with their engine architecture and it's putting a lot of strain on it's userbase.
- 1_player 7y ago
  > I know Unity is under a bit of an upheaval right now with their engine architecture and it's putting a lot of strain on it's userbase. Care to elaborate?
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    They are migrating several modules from C++ to C#, by making use of their Burst compiler stack, and have introduced a new ECS based framework named DOTS, on the quest to appease to AAA studios.
    - jayd16 7y ago
      I don't think its a AAA request, per se. Unity seems to constantly need features to slap on the box. At this point it feels like DOTS is significantly influenced by the marketing team. I mean, engineers would spell out the features and not wrap it up into this vague concepts of "DOTS."
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        To be fair everyone wants to tick features on their box. DOTS doesn't seem that vague to me.
      - learc83 7y ago
        It's wrapped up in a new concept because it's a complete re-architecture. You do almost everything differently with DOTS. And its driven by the CTO and Mike Acton from what I can tell. I've been making a game with DOTS for the last year, so I've been following this pretty closely. DOTS is what convinced me to use Unity because I hated the old Unity way of doing things.
        vanderZwan 7y ago
        I don't know what DOTS is an acronym for, but if Mike Acton is involved I guess the first two letters stand for "Data Oriented"?
ljm 7y ago
A real draw for me is working with C++ in it, since both Unity and Unreal appear to favour managed languages (C#, some JS variant, some weird Python style thing, etc.) No real reason for preferring C++ except I want to learn it, and my pet project is a little game rather than yet another web app/thing that renders DB records to HTML/thing that takes one JSON blob and turns it to another. I never did computer science so this sort of trial by fire is super appealing to me.
- Kenji 7y ago
  I never did computer science Trust me, C++ is far from computer science (as in, the actual science). You might even be at an advantage if you're more of a hands-on person than a mathematician.
- forgotpwd16 7y ago
  Unreal has dropped their scripting language for a visual alternative called Blueprints. It is possible to make an entire game with it not writing any C++ and is possible to make one completely in C++. The best is of course using them together. And exactly the same applies to Godot. Just swap Blueprints for GDScript a Python-like scripting language. In a final note Unity, has dropped JavaScript. Though C++ can somehow be used, C# is indeed more or less Unity's language.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    > In a final note Unity, has dropped JavaScript. The thing that Unity dropped wasn't really JavaScript, and nobody in their right mind actually used it. It was called "UnityScript", and it was just a thin veneer over CLR that looked a bit like JavaScript, but exposed the CLR object model and C# APIs to arrays and dictionaries, etc, instead of supporting standard JavaScript APIs. The biggest problem was that most JavaScript libraries aren't compatible with UnityScript. Another big problem is that it wasn't as powerful, useful, and standard as C#. And yet another problem is that it wasn't an interactive language, so you couldn't load it at runtime, and had to run it through the compiler (which could take half an hour before you could see your changes). https://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/UnityScript_versus_JavaScript https://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/UnityScript_versus_JavaSc... >It is not uncommon for Unity developers and even members of Unity Technologies to refer to Unity's JavaScript like language as simply "JavaScript", as if it was equivalent or interchangeable with what most people know of as JavaScript on the web. However, the two are actually very different languages. Although they do resemble each other syntactically they have very different semantics. While "JavaScript" is merely a generic name and could refer to any one of many implementations of the ECMAScript specification, Unity's "JavaScript" language doesn't even come close to conforming to that specification — nor does it try to. It's a proprietary language and it doesn't actually follow any concrete specification of standard JavaScript and is modified at will by the engine developers. >Because of this, the vast majority of JavaScript libraries you find will not work by default in Unity. Unity's "JavaScript" is most similar to Microsoft's JScript.NET, although it is not quite identical. Thus many developers prefer to call the language Unity uses "UnityScript" instead, to help differentiate it. Some people consider this to be "just semantics", but when people call both "JavaScript" it becomes a lot harder to search the internet for solutions and help related to Unity. It's also quite a lot of trouble to continuously specify whether one is referring to "real" JavaScript or Unity's version. So it's best to just stick with "JavaScript" for real JavaScript and "UnityScript" for Unity's language. Unity also had a language called Boo that was to Python like UnityScript was to JavaScript, and nobody in their right mind used that either. UnityScript is actually a layer on top of Boo. Both UnityScript and Boo are obsolete and deprecated, fortunately, and nobody will miss them. Your time is MUCH better spend learning C# than UnityScript or Boo. UnityScript’s long ride off into the sunset https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/08/11/unityscripts-long-ride-off-into-the-sunset/ https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/08/11/unityscripts-long-ride-... On the other hand, I've been developing UnityJS, which lets you program Unity3D in real honest-to-god JavaScript, download and debug code at runtime without recompiling your Unity app (which makes development astronomically faster), and use any standard JavaScript libraries and tools. And it works really well with the WebGL platform, for integrating Unity apps with web stuff, as well as on iOS and Android too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19748582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19748582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18171571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18171571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18860467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18860467
bufferoverflow 7y ago
It's hard to compete with Unity and Unreal, both of which are much more popular and feature rich.

throw_m239339 7y ago

It's all about the $$$ and the community. Blender started as a commercial project too. I was already using it in the 90's alongside POVRay. The good thing is unlike in the photography or the print industry there is no real industry wide vendor lock-in when it comes to formats in 3D, so it's always possible to create a challenger. Right now Godot isn't really on par with Unity, but it could become the de-facto game engine for Blender in the future if Godot allows deep integration with the former.

brachi 7y ago
> there is no real industry wide vendor lock-in when it comes to formats in 3D Mmm, Blender had a lot of problems having to reverse FBX from autodesk, which AFAIK is or was a de-facto standard. About open standards, I kinda hate xml, so I didn't like Collada much. I'm looking forward for knowing more about glTF[1]. Thankfully Blender 2.8 had the official add-on from the beginning.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  glTF was introduced by Khronos for WebGL, then thanks to Microsoft glTF 2.0 was born and became API agnostic. Khronos YouTube channel has lots of talks on the format.

PudgePacket 7y ago

I hope so! Though the Blender situation is a little different. Blenders main competition are paid software. While Unity and Unreal are technically paid too, many users can use them "for free" for the most part. Unity and Unreal are both foraying into non-gaming applications like Cinema, and whatever the word is for working with architectural programs/formats. Might be an opportunity for Godot to stay focused and gain mind share that way? I know Unity is under a bit of an upheaval right now with their engine architecture and it's putting a lot of strain on it's userbase.

1_player 7y ago
> I know Unity is under a bit of an upheaval right now with their engine architecture and it's putting a lot of strain on it's userbase. Care to elaborate?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  They are migrating several modules from C++ to C#, by making use of their Burst compiler stack, and have introduced a new ECS based framework named DOTS, on the quest to appease to AAA studios.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    I don't think its a AAA request, per se. Unity seems to constantly need features to slap on the box. At this point it feels like DOTS is significantly influenced by the marketing team. I mean, engineers would spell out the features and not wrap it up into this vague concepts of "DOTS."
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      To be fair everyone wants to tick features on their box. DOTS doesn't seem that vague to me.
    - learc83 7y ago
      It's wrapped up in a new concept because it's a complete re-architecture. You do almost everything differently with DOTS. And its driven by the CTO and Mike Acton from what I can tell. I've been making a game with DOTS for the last year, so I've been following this pretty closely. DOTS is what convinced me to use Unity because I hated the old Unity way of doing things.
      - vanderZwan 7y ago
        I don't know what DOTS is an acronym for, but if Mike Acton is involved I guess the first two letters stand for "Data Oriented"?

ljm 7y ago

A real draw for me is working with C++ in it, since both Unity and Unreal appear to favour managed languages (C#, some JS variant, some weird Python style thing, etc.) No real reason for preferring C++ except I want to learn it, and my pet project is a little game rather than yet another web app/thing that renders DB records to HTML/thing that takes one JSON blob and turns it to another. I never did computer science so this sort of trial by fire is super appealing to me.

Kenji 7y ago
I never did computer science Trust me, C++ is far from computer science (as in, the actual science). You might even be at an advantage if you're more of a hands-on person than a mathematician.
forgotpwd16 7y ago
Unreal has dropped their scripting language for a visual alternative called Blueprints. It is possible to make an entire game with it not writing any C++ and is possible to make one completely in C++. The best is of course using them together. And exactly the same applies to Godot. Just swap Blueprints for GDScript a Python-like scripting language. In a final note Unity, has dropped JavaScript. Though C++ can somehow be used, C# is indeed more or less Unity's language.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  > In a final note Unity, has dropped JavaScript. The thing that Unity dropped wasn't really JavaScript, and nobody in their right mind actually used it. It was called "UnityScript", and it was just a thin veneer over CLR that looked a bit like JavaScript, but exposed the CLR object model and C# APIs to arrays and dictionaries, etc, instead of supporting standard JavaScript APIs. The biggest problem was that most JavaScript libraries aren't compatible with UnityScript. Another big problem is that it wasn't as powerful, useful, and standard as C#. And yet another problem is that it wasn't an interactive language, so you couldn't load it at runtime, and had to run it through the compiler (which could take half an hour before you could see your changes). https://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/UnityScript_versus_JavaScript https://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/UnityScript_versus_JavaSc... >It is not uncommon for Unity developers and even members of Unity Technologies to refer to Unity's JavaScript like language as simply "JavaScript", as if it was equivalent or interchangeable with what most people know of as JavaScript on the web. However, the two are actually very different languages. Although they do resemble each other syntactically they have very different semantics. While "JavaScript" is merely a generic name and could refer to any one of many implementations of the ECMAScript specification, Unity's "JavaScript" language doesn't even come close to conforming to that specification — nor does it try to. It's a proprietary language and it doesn't actually follow any concrete specification of standard JavaScript and is modified at will by the engine developers. >Because of this, the vast majority of JavaScript libraries you find will not work by default in Unity. Unity's "JavaScript" is most similar to Microsoft's JScript.NET, although it is not quite identical. Thus many developers prefer to call the language Unity uses "UnityScript" instead, to help differentiate it. Some people consider this to be "just semantics", but when people call both "JavaScript" it becomes a lot harder to search the internet for solutions and help related to Unity. It's also quite a lot of trouble to continuously specify whether one is referring to "real" JavaScript or Unity's version. So it's best to just stick with "JavaScript" for real JavaScript and "UnityScript" for Unity's language. Unity also had a language called Boo that was to Python like UnityScript was to JavaScript, and nobody in their right mind used that either. UnityScript is actually a layer on top of Boo. Both UnityScript and Boo are obsolete and deprecated, fortunately, and nobody will miss them. Your time is MUCH better spend learning C# than UnityScript or Boo. UnityScript’s long ride off into the sunset https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/08/11/unityscripts-long-ride-off-into-the-sunset/ https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/08/11/unityscripts-long-ride-... On the other hand, I've been developing UnityJS, which lets you program Unity3D in real honest-to-god JavaScript, download and debug code at runtime without recompiling your Unity app (which makes development astronomically faster), and use any standard JavaScript libraries and tools. And it works really well with the WebGL platform, for integrating Unity apps with web stuff, as well as on iOS and Android too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19748582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19748582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20745676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18171571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18171571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18860467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18860467

bufferoverflow 7y ago

It's hard to compete with Unity and Unreal, both of which are much more popular and feature rich.