16 ms·

Godot 3.2

366 points by makepanic 7y ago

blensor 7y ago
Thanks to the Godot devs. I've been using the 3.2 betas over the last months and I was totally happy with the experience. But I am happy that I can work with an official release version now which makes it easier to have others use the codebase as well.
nnq 7y ago
Anyone here using Godot for VR/AR dev? ...curious what's the story here and how it stands against Unity on this front since I'm lately interested with developing VR productivity apps and using a game-engine seems like kind of the only viable cross-platform solution for this, the path that others have taken too. But which engine... that's an open question, and I'm not that fond of Unity :)
- npace12 7y ago
  I’m using it for VR dev on the oculus quest and I think the dev experience in 3.2 is very good. I haven’t actually used Unity, though, so not sure how it compares. Once you get it all set up, you can just hit the android button and it’ll export the apk directly to the device. Also, you are still able to live view via wifi.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Game engines are not the only path for that kind of app. I have written apps (not games) using just OpenVR and Vulkan. The only questionable choice in that combo was Vulkan - bootstrapping that was a major time sink. OpenVR doesn't have tons of documentation, but when you start out from one of the examples, you should be fine. It is a pretty decent API.
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    Yeah, there's not a lot of choice in how you represent an API for a VR headset. You have to give the implementing program a position and orientation at some point. And you have to do it fast. So I think most of the APIs end up pretty similar in concepts because of that. In some cases, the data structures are almost identical, other than the names of fields.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      That is true. Some of the OpenVR input event handling and compositor interaction is a bit weird, if you need any of that at all. The rest is quite straightforward. It's not the API itself, but juggling all the different coordinate systems (room, eyes, controllers etc.) that tends to keep things interesting.
- blensor 7y ago
  I built that [1] with it. Getting somehting playable was incredibly fast (but I guess that's not different from unity), and I have not hit any major roadblocks yet. Development was rather smooth. The fact that the hand tracking was supported even before it was supported in Unreal Engine (as far as I know) is also a major plus. A big shout out to Holger Dammertz who did the work on that. [1] www.vrworkout.at
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
    Just checked out your project's github, very impressive. Can't wait to get my Quest and trying it out, thanks for sharing.
    - blensor 7y ago
      The github page does not yet reflect the very latest release, still have to upload the video (due to lack of time :) ). But the latest version has an additional freeplay mode without music (just the sound effects), that way you can play your own music hit the drum to the beat of the music to tell the game the BPM and then you can play to your own background music.
- gotodengo 7y ago
  I'm making RoomWithAView [1] in Godot. Not quite a productivity app, more an apartment builder/computer interface. Although on a bit of a hiatus (and a bit buggy) for the time being. I'm pulling in desktop screens to VR which can be moved and placed as wanted. Working on pulling in individual applications and doing application launching. Aside from that it exposes a good bit of file system access in game. So a decent amount of stuff a productivity app may want to do. I'm not a Unity guy but I briefly tried VR in Unity and the support seemed quite fractured. SteamVR has multiple versions across stores/github and I wasn't sure which to use, ditto for various tool kits. Godot I just downloaded a sample project and striped it down then worked off that. The hardest part is doing anything non-gamey. Occasionally I'll make a help post and people will just reply "why would anyone want to do that?" but the C# support means you can use just about any libraries out there, so pretty much anything is possible with enough fiddling. I dropped the idea but even had OpenCV working with the Index's webcams at one point. [1] https://ark1ve.itch.io/roomwithaview https://ark1ve.itch.io/roomwithaview
- shafyy 7y ago
  I can recommend Godot for VR. I switched from Unity to Godot a couple of months ago and haven't looked back. I'm developing for the Quest on Mac and Godot is significantly faster in building to run on your device. Plus, the hot-reload feature means that you don't need to rebuild every time (although once your Quest goes to sleep you need to rebuild). Other than that, I love Godot's node system, that it's compatibile with a mulitude of languages (although GDScript is awesome and I didn't need to add C# or something as of yet). If you're looking at the Quest, Holger Dammertz is doing an awesome job with the Oculus Quest Toolkit[0] where I'm also a contributor. [0]: https://github.com/NeoSpark314/godot_oculus_quest_toolkit https://github.com/NeoSpark314/godot_oculus_quest_toolkit
  - nnq 7y ago
    Thanks! My dev setup would also be "for Quest, on a Macbook" 80% of the time, so it means a lot if you found the very same scenario to work :) ...still hacking around with Unity, but after I get a basic PoC of what I'm doing I might switch to Godot (with C# as the language) for developing the actual MVC.
    - shafyy 7y ago
      Sounds good. Let me know if you have any questions =)
phn 7y ago
Just in time to try it on the global game jam next weekend!
diegoperini 7y ago
I loved the tone of this article. The parts where it says things like "Bastiaan did this, Yuri did that..." is what I always want to see in these kind of technology news.
arminiusreturns 7y ago
Godot has been a breath of fresh air for me lately (been running master branch for a while) and I know that it is going to only get better. I can't wait for the vulkan renderer to be ready, I think it's going to a game changer for godot. After Epic originally promised to make linux a first class citizen, I went all in ue4, but they lied and went back on all those promises, and I have since moved to a completely open source gamedev pipeline and I think it's the future. For example, think about how much mods make or break game longetivity and communities. If valve hadnt given us world hammer, there would be no counterstrike, no tf2, no garrys mod, no age of chivalry and ergo no chivalry medieval warfare. The residual effects of modding capabilities are huge, and having formats that are easy to work with with normal tooling (like gltf) mean open source gaming in a game engine like godot (or a few others, armory3d is another) could be a sleeping giant just in the early stages of waking.
- diegoperini 7y ago
  Did they ditch the entire idea of having Linux support or is it just that they were slow on improving the compatibility?
  - leetrout 7y ago
    No OP, but one related example as a dev, you cannot buy / use anything from their marketplace (like a blueprint plugin) on Linux. There are some hacks out there to load them but you still have to buy them from the Windows client.
  - michaelbrave 7y ago
    I can't speak for him but my experience compiling from source wasn't that bad, but if I wanted to use any assets from the store it required having the epic launcher installed on windows, so no download of assets on linux. This was frustrating the first time I showed up to a game jam with a linux only machine, not impossible to use but a pain that felt unnessisary.
  - EamonnMR 7y ago
    Epic just acquired Rocket League and removed Linux support.
edf13 7y ago
Congrats to all 450 contributors who worked on this over the last 10 months! GoDotEngine is something on my list of things to get into as soon as time allows.
- jhauris 7y ago
  The amazing thing to me is that 300 of those contributors were contributing for the first time.
shafyy 7y ago
Folks, if you love Godot make sure to support them on their Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://www.patreon.com/godotengine (I'm not affiliated with Godot, I just use it and love it)
- SeekingMeaning 7y ago
  They’re currently at $10,000 a month, or $120,000 a year. That’s really amazing!
  - indigo945 7y ago
    That doesn't even pay for a single developer if factoring in taxes and other costs of employment.
    - danielrpa 7y ago
      In California... In other countries, or many other states in the US, that would be enough. Doesn't mean that people shouldn't contribute, it's a great project!
    - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
      Well maybe this is a good opportunity for those googlers who were writing here about being satisfied with their income but were bored with their job and looking for more meaningful work to contribute to.
    - nameless912 7y ago
      I think there's only two full time developers on the project, and both are based in Brazil, so this actually goes a really long way.
      - NilsIRL 7y ago
        Akien (project manager) isn't based in Brazil, he's French. And Juan (project manager) lives in Argentina (according to his GitHub). George however, who has been employed only recently does live in Brazil (according to his GitHub).
Kiro 7y ago
I make 2D games and it seems that Godot is good for that. I'm scared of GDScript though, e.g. not being able to use a package registry that normally comes with standard languages. What's everyone's experience?
- willis936 7y ago
  After looking into as many engines as I could find, I chose godot for a 2D game. I don't have significant game creation experience, but I've consumed a lot of media and pay close attention. While I'm not neck deep in development, GDScript seems perfectly reasonable. Most of what it's used for is in making things that are somewhat custom/demand labor anyway. Menus, object interactions, etc. It just takes a few days of playing around with test scenes. What I have yet to try to tackle is the C import tool. Let's say I have a grid of many objects that interact with each other. I don't necessarily want GDScript to be running the logic for 10,000 objects (an extreme number, I'd likely limit it to less, but I still like the idea of keeping performance in mind). So C is a good choice. But suddenly I have to establish and maintain a big connection between GDScript and C. Everytime a feature is added it has to be added in several places. Maybe this is just the way things are done and I should just do the work. I'm worried it is the wrong way to do it.
- nameless912 7y ago
  If you can write Python, you can write GDScript. You'll get bitten very occasionally with the differences, but the core language is extremely similar. As for a package registry...meh. There are a lot of built ins to GDScript that make depending on external code mostly a non-issue.
- leppr 7y ago
  It's very limiting, and for many other reasons than the lack of a package registry. My advice is to not lose time with it and go straight to C#, unless your projects are throwaway game jam entries.
- nrjames 7y ago
  I've used Godot to make a few 2D games and the experience was wonderful compared to Unity (for me). GDScript is similar to Python and very easy to learn. Godot also has GDNative that supports bindings to lots of other languages, so you might want to look into that: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/bbfpa7/what_programming_languages_does_godot_support/ekit44q/ https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/bbfpa7/what_programm...
disease 7y ago
Supporting the web target for c# is a HUGE deal for me as someone that makes hobbyist game jam projects and doesn't want to learn another language (already know c#, not thrilled about learning GDScript). I can't understate how much of a big deal the growing support for c# is. Both for non-game devs who want to dip their feet in making games and also luring in current Unity developers.
- csdreamer7 7y ago
  GDScript is just Python that has some tweaks. For example to preload a child node you put this in a node's member space. onready var enemy = $Enemy Variables needing to be declared with the var keyword is the biggest change in the language. var flag = some_function_result() Other changes include expanding Python with more keywords useful for the editor and game programming. It is very nice for prototyping. Still looking forward to that C# AOT support in later releases.
  - vincent-toups 7y ago
    It doesn't have lambda, even the bad lambda from python.
    - aaronsnoswell 7y ago
      This is an intentional design decision in the language - not having lambda functions / functions as first-class citizens makes the code easier to optimize internally.
      - vincent-toups 7y ago
        It also makes me feel like I'm programming in 1987. LuaJIT does fine with lambdas and I'd bet good money chibi-scheme is faster than GDScript. Its not a really good excuse.
rcarmo 7y ago
Need to try it ASAP, although I see the issue that prevented my kids from using it (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/24890 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/24890) is still open - managed accounts present a few challenges, but I hope this has been sorted somehow.
- klohto 7y ago
  Would running it inside a container and creating shortcut for your kids be a possible workaround?
  - rcarmo 7y ago
    On a Mac? No.
electronstudio 7y ago
When I started developing RetroWar[1], I found Unity quite a disappointment, and so I developed my own custom engine in Kotlin. It works very well, but it took several years. Recently I tried Godot because I was looking for something simple I could teach to kids[2], and I was amazed how easy it makes game creation. I made these games with no experience in just a couple of days! https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_racing https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_racing https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_space https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_space GDscript is great. It's similar enough to Python that kids who know Python won't notice much difference, and it actually simplifies things for beginners, e.g. you can use objects without the need to define classes because they are created automatically when you create a script. Godot is still a little rough around the edges, e.g. not everything has keyboard shortcuts, sometimes it crashes, some of the built in tools like map editor are very fiddly to use. But it's open source so I'm sure they will be fixed eventually (and if they aren't I can always do it myself.) The only major issue I can see for the future of Godot is the lack of exporters for Xbox, Playstation and Switch. [1] http://retrowar.net http://retrowar.net [2] https://loughton.me.uk/2020/01/22/godot.html https://loughton.me.uk/2020/01/22/godot.html
- olsonjeffery 7y ago
  *lack of public exporters. Because of the NDAs around shipping for these platforms, no one can "advertise" that they have the exporters, but the truth is that there are consultants/gamedev shops who have done this work for all of the current platforms. You just have to get in touch with them via the community. EDIT: This page has some backstory: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
  - electronstudio 7y ago
    Sure you can hire someone to do the port - they do advertise it on that very page. But there is another open source game library, Monogame, that distributes their code for free for consoles. You just have to vertify that you are have signed the NDA before you get access to the code. They advertise this. So there is no reason that Godot couldn't do the same if they wanted to open that code.
zubspace 7y ago
Been playing around with the Release Candidate, coming from Unity. Here's a list of things which I like / dislike: ++ Open License and friendly community. ++ The scene graph (node tree / prefabs) is well done, better than Unity. You can easily switch between scenes (Prefabs) through tabs and convert subtrees to separate scenes. Nesting scenes works really well. ++ The inbuilt scripting documentation is great. - C# is not fully there, yet. No Visual studio integration. Debugging through VSCode is a pain. WebAssembly Exports are not optimized yet. That's why I sticked with GDScript. + GDScript is a nice language with optional type hinting. But refactoring can mostly be done through search/replace. ++ Windows and HTML/WebGL exports are super fast. I did not have problems since the RC. - The inbuilt editor for GDScripts is ok. But I'm missing my VIM shortcuts... - Arrays, dictionaries are not generic. Enums are not typesafe either. Bit me a few times. - You cannot inspect the scene in the editor visually while debugging. This is what I miss the most coming from unity. Some things are really hard to debug this way, for example if you use procedural generation. - 2D coords starting at the top left corner of the screen and increasing right/down is really confusing. If the player jumps, y goes down. It's a bit strange. - I'm a bit afraid regarding the +5000 open issues on github. I wonder, how they will handle that in the future...
- _def 7y ago
  > 2D coords starting at the top left corner of the screen and increasing right/down is really confusing. If the player jumps, y goes down. It's a bit strange. Where do the coords start in Unity? Just curious
  - zubspace 7y ago
    In Unity up is +y, down is -y. In Godot it's reversed, I guess because screen updates usually start at the top left corner of the screen.
    - Insanity 7y ago
      It's reversed in most places historically. 0,0 is top-left. I think unity is the odd one here
cdiamand 7y ago
I stumbled upon Godot after seeing (and buying) https://store.steampowered.com/app/1189230/Door_in_the_Woods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1189230/Door_in_the_Woods... It's an ascii roguelike with a neat 3d aesthetic. Godot was a pleasure to install and play around with it. I recommend taking a look!
xwowsersx 7y ago
My son (10 years old) wants to learn how to make games so we sat down together and went through the tutorial from the beginning. Very enjoyable.
- keyle 7y ago
  Nice! I made a tiny game with a car for my 3 year old and he's already asking me "how do I do this too"...
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    Awesome! Nice to be able to share the joy of programming using an activity kids already love.
malkia 7y ago
The UI looks really polished, but it's missing one crucial feature - multi-monitor ("window") support - with docking.
woollysammoth 7y ago
I've been working with Godot/Websockets lately and it has been really enjoyable -- excited for Juan's 4.0 vulkan work!
somebodythere 7y ago
I am refreshed by Godot's versioning scheme. Point releases are something to get excited about.
jokoon 7y ago
I tried to learn it a little but I did not manage to understand how it works, I don't really like the whole WYSIWYG thing, it forces the developer to surrender control, and you waste a big amount of time teaching yourself how it works internally, time that could be spent being productive with a simple renderer. It also seems to support c++ as "gdnative", although it requires another compiler to link against godot's binaries. It seems awkward because you still need to use the godot editor, and there is still a lot of interfacing to write. It seems like a good alternative to unity, but in the end, all I want is an engine, not a "framework" or some awkward scene editor with some kind of Node hierarchy/interface. I could say the same thing about UE4. I hear everywhere that's it's the place to go, that "everybody uses it and it's the norm in the industry if you want to make a game from scratch", but the reality is that those frameworks are too big and too feature rich. It sounds like they want to attract young developers to lock them into those awkward frameworks, because they advertise it as being full-featured engines, but small developers might not really need to focus on bleeding edge rendering, so it doesn't make sense. I know there are engines like Ogre3D, but I would rather spend time learning an actual universal graphics API that works on all hardware, which has more value on a resume, and I can just use what I need. All other things like audio, animation, inputs, physics, etc are available as C++ libraries. Those frameworks are saying "see? you can make your own game with those tools!", but when you actually learn how a computer works, and know how to write code, you realize you want to avoid those frameworks because they conceal too much from the programmer, and usually you don't want a developer to not understand what the framework is doing. I guess this is why people have a problem with certain object-oriented practices and abstraction. EDIT: Here is a nice video which benchmarks unity against a simple, very similar from-scratch equivalent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y
- unknown2374 7y ago
  I think you are missing the fundamental purpose behind game engines. Game and graphics programming is really hard, and at times unapproachable to a lot of people. Moreover, in the real world, even experts prefer to use game engines just due to the fact that it is almost guaranteed that a raw renderer you write yourself is not going to be as good and optimized as a game egnine's renderer. Using game engines may not suffice to your use case, but for a lot of people that's the best way to develop games. This argument is similar to using a systems level language vs a higher level language. I myself prefer game frameworks over either raw graphics APIs and game engines, since it provides me with my preferred level of control while meeting my particular needs. I can see where you come from, if your goal is to learn and highlight that in your resume, writing and experimenting against the graphics APIs are likely the best bet. But for a lot of people, their main goal differs from yours, which is to... make a game.
ncmncm 7y ago
It took rather some poking around the site to discover that Godot is (apparently) a game engine coded in C#. Hint for people posting release announcements: you could save a great many people quite a lot of time, cumulatively, with just a single short sentence in the first paragraph of your announcement. You probably would pick up some new participants who would have given up in disgust before they could discover what the hell the thing is.
- DisownedWheat 7y ago
  It's not coded in C#, it's written in C++. Release notes for a new version are not the place to list all the features of the engine. You can literally click on the home page and see "Object-oriented API with language options such as GDScript, C#, C++ and visual scripting.". If people give up "in disgust" because they can't find what language the engine uses for scripting immediately in the first sentence of a release announcement then they're probably not cut out for making any kind of software which requires digging through documentation.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    So even looking around and following links, I still guessed wrong about what the hell it is. Nobody asked for, or needs, a list of "all the features" in a release announcement. Saying what the project is (such as that it is some kind of "engine", and maybe even what kind?) would have been a completely different, and much shorter and overwhelmingly more useful statement. What should motivate a reader who cannot even tell what it is to spend time groveling around to find out whether they might be interested in the thing? Hint: most projects are not interesting to most people. Forced to guess, the best guess has to be "no". I am repeatedly astonished that such elementary reasoning seems beyond so many. As it happens, for example, a game engine in C# is of zero interest to me, but one in C++ could be quite interesting. I dismissed it as a direct consequence of the failure of the announcement to give me any reason to pay it any more attention.
    - DisownedWheat 7y ago
      If having to click on the logo to go to the home page sends you into such an apoplectic rage then I don't know what to tell you. If you look at, for instance, the .NET Core 3.0 release notes[1] there is no mention in the first few paragraphs of what it is. You have to click away to see it. "I am repeatedly astonished that such elementary reasoning seems beyond so many." Perhaps you're just wrong? If everywhere you go smells like shit you should check your shoes. [1]https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-core-3-0/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-core-3-...
legostormtroopr 7y ago
I've been waiting for this! My friend and I were starting to doubt it would arrive.
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
This looks really nice. Every time I see Godot, I tell myself that one day I'll get around to making that game I dreamed up in undergrad.
WillYouFinish 7y ago
I feel like I used Godot wrong when I read these comments. I did three small games and it seemed to me that everything in Godot was put on the same complexity level. Everything is simple, but super simple tasks have become harder. And then there are inconsistencies like the sprites are not in the node tree but in another space. I don’t get it. I found it really hard to get my ideas into the engine. The low level approach would take just a fraction of the time for me.

366 points by makepanic 7y ago

Thanks to the Godot devs. I've been using the 3.2 betas over the last months and I was totally happy with the experience. But I am happy that I can work with an official release version now which makes it easier to have others use the codebase as well.

nnq 7y ago

Anyone here using Godot for VR/AR dev? ...curious what's the story here and how it stands against Unity on this front since I'm lately interested with developing VR productivity apps and using a game-engine seems like kind of the only viable cross-platform solution for this, the path that others have taken too. But which engine... that's an open question, and I'm not that fond of Unity :)

npace12 7y ago
I’m using it for VR dev on the oculus quest and I think the dev experience in 3.2 is very good. I haven’t actually used Unity, though, so not sure how it compares. Once you get it all set up, you can just hit the android button and it’ll export the apk directly to the device. Also, you are still able to live view via wifi.
gmueckl 7y ago
Game engines are not the only path for that kind of app. I have written apps (not games) using just OpenVR and Vulkan. The only questionable choice in that combo was Vulkan - bootstrapping that was a major time sink. OpenVR doesn't have tons of documentation, but when you start out from one of the examples, you should be fine. It is a pretty decent API.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  Yeah, there's not a lot of choice in how you represent an API for a VR headset. You have to give the implementing program a position and orientation at some point. And you have to do it fast. So I think most of the APIs end up pretty similar in concepts because of that. In some cases, the data structures are almost identical, other than the names of fields.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    That is true. Some of the OpenVR input event handling and compositor interaction is a bit weird, if you need any of that at all. The rest is quite straightforward. It's not the API itself, but juggling all the different coordinate systems (room, eyes, controllers etc.) that tends to keep things interesting.
blensor 7y ago
I built that [1] with it. Getting somehting playable was incredibly fast (but I guess that's not different from unity), and I have not hit any major roadblocks yet. Development was rather smooth. The fact that the hand tracking was supported even before it was supported in Unreal Engine (as far as I know) is also a major plus. A big shout out to Holger Dammertz who did the work on that. [1] www.vrworkout.at
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Just checked out your project's github, very impressive. Can't wait to get my Quest and trying it out, thanks for sharing.
  - blensor 7y ago
    The github page does not yet reflect the very latest release, still have to upload the video (due to lack of time :) ). But the latest version has an additional freeplay mode without music (just the sound effects), that way you can play your own music hit the drum to the beat of the music to tell the game the BPM and then you can play to your own background music.
gotodengo 7y ago
I'm making RoomWithAView [1] in Godot. Not quite a productivity app, more an apartment builder/computer interface. Although on a bit of a hiatus (and a bit buggy) for the time being. I'm pulling in desktop screens to VR which can be moved and placed as wanted. Working on pulling in individual applications and doing application launching. Aside from that it exposes a good bit of file system access in game. So a decent amount of stuff a productivity app may want to do. I'm not a Unity guy but I briefly tried VR in Unity and the support seemed quite fractured. SteamVR has multiple versions across stores/github and I wasn't sure which to use, ditto for various tool kits. Godot I just downloaded a sample project and striped it down then worked off that. The hardest part is doing anything non-gamey. Occasionally I'll make a help post and people will just reply "why would anyone want to do that?" but the C# support means you can use just about any libraries out there, so pretty much anything is possible with enough fiddling. I dropped the idea but even had OpenCV working with the Index's webcams at one point. [1] https://ark1ve.itch.io/roomwithaview https://ark1ve.itch.io/roomwithaview
shafyy 7y ago
I can recommend Godot for VR. I switched from Unity to Godot a couple of months ago and haven't looked back. I'm developing for the Quest on Mac and Godot is significantly faster in building to run on your device. Plus, the hot-reload feature means that you don't need to rebuild every time (although once your Quest goes to sleep you need to rebuild). Other than that, I love Godot's node system, that it's compatibile with a mulitude of languages (although GDScript is awesome and I didn't need to add C# or something as of yet). If you're looking at the Quest, Holger Dammertz is doing an awesome job with the Oculus Quest Toolkit[0] where I'm also a contributor. [0]: https://github.com/NeoSpark314/godot_oculus_quest_toolkit https://github.com/NeoSpark314/godot_oculus_quest_toolkit
- nnq 7y ago
  Thanks! My dev setup would also be "for Quest, on a Macbook" 80% of the time, so it means a lot if you found the very same scenario to work :) ...still hacking around with Unity, but after I get a basic PoC of what I'm doing I might switch to Godot (with C# as the language) for developing the actual MVC.
  - shafyy 7y ago
    Sounds good. Let me know if you have any questions =)

phn 7y ago

Just in time to try it on the global game jam next weekend!

diegoperini 7y ago

I loved the tone of this article. The parts where it says things like "Bastiaan did this, Yuri did that..." is what I always want to see in these kind of technology news.

arminiusreturns 7y ago

Godot has been a breath of fresh air for me lately (been running master branch for a while) and I know that it is going to only get better. I can't wait for the vulkan renderer to be ready, I think it's going to a game changer for godot. After Epic originally promised to make linux a first class citizen, I went all in ue4, but they lied and went back on all those promises, and I have since moved to a completely open source gamedev pipeline and I think it's the future. For example, think about how much mods make or break game longetivity and communities. If valve hadnt given us world hammer, there would be no counterstrike, no tf2, no garrys mod, no age of chivalry and ergo no chivalry medieval warfare. The residual effects of modding capabilities are huge, and having formats that are easy to work with with normal tooling (like gltf) mean open source gaming in a game engine like godot (or a few others, armory3d is another) could be a sleeping giant just in the early stages of waking.

diegoperini 7y ago
Did they ditch the entire idea of having Linux support or is it just that they were slow on improving the compatibility?
- leetrout 7y ago
  No OP, but one related example as a dev, you cannot buy / use anything from their marketplace (like a blueprint plugin) on Linux. There are some hacks out there to load them but you still have to buy them from the Windows client.
- michaelbrave 7y ago
  I can't speak for him but my experience compiling from source wasn't that bad, but if I wanted to use any assets from the store it required having the epic launcher installed on windows, so no download of assets on linux. This was frustrating the first time I showed up to a game jam with a linux only machine, not impossible to use but a pain that felt unnessisary.
- EamonnMR 7y ago
  Epic just acquired Rocket League and removed Linux support.

edf13 7y ago

Congrats to all 450 contributors who worked on this over the last 10 months! GoDotEngine is something on my list of things to get into as soon as time allows.

jhauris 7y ago
The amazing thing to me is that 300 of those contributors were contributing for the first time.

shafyy 7y ago

Folks, if you love Godot make sure to support them on their Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://www.patreon.com/godotengine (I'm not affiliated with Godot, I just use it and love it)

SeekingMeaning 7y ago
They’re currently at $10,000 a month, or $120,000 a year. That’s really amazing!
- indigo945 7y ago
  That doesn't even pay for a single developer if factoring in taxes and other costs of employment.
  - danielrpa 7y ago
    In California... In other countries, or many other states in the US, that would be enough. Doesn't mean that people shouldn't contribute, it's a great project!
  - ChuckNorris89 7y ago
    Well maybe this is a good opportunity for those googlers who were writing here about being satisfied with their income but were bored with their job and looking for more meaningful work to contribute to.
  - nameless912 7y ago
    I think there's only two full time developers on the project, and both are based in Brazil, so this actually goes a really long way.
    - NilsIRL 7y ago
      Akien (project manager) isn't based in Brazil, he's French. And Juan (project manager) lives in Argentina (according to his GitHub). George however, who has been employed only recently does live in Brazil (according to his GitHub).

Kiro 7y ago

I make 2D games and it seems that Godot is good for that. I'm scared of GDScript though, e.g. not being able to use a package registry that normally comes with standard languages. What's everyone's experience?

willis936 7y ago
After looking into as many engines as I could find, I chose godot for a 2D game. I don't have significant game creation experience, but I've consumed a lot of media and pay close attention. While I'm not neck deep in development, GDScript seems perfectly reasonable. Most of what it's used for is in making things that are somewhat custom/demand labor anyway. Menus, object interactions, etc. It just takes a few days of playing around with test scenes. What I have yet to try to tackle is the C import tool. Let's say I have a grid of many objects that interact with each other. I don't necessarily want GDScript to be running the logic for 10,000 objects (an extreme number, I'd likely limit it to less, but I still like the idea of keeping performance in mind). So C is a good choice. But suddenly I have to establish and maintain a big connection between GDScript and C. Everytime a feature is added it has to be added in several places. Maybe this is just the way things are done and I should just do the work. I'm worried it is the wrong way to do it.
nameless912 7y ago
If you can write Python, you can write GDScript. You'll get bitten very occasionally with the differences, but the core language is extremely similar. As for a package registry...meh. There are a lot of built ins to GDScript that make depending on external code mostly a non-issue.
leppr 7y ago
It's very limiting, and for many other reasons than the lack of a package registry. My advice is to not lose time with it and go straight to C#, unless your projects are throwaway game jam entries.
nrjames 7y ago
I've used Godot to make a few 2D games and the experience was wonderful compared to Unity (for me). GDScript is similar to Python and very easy to learn. Godot also has GDNative that supports bindings to lots of other languages, so you might want to look into that: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/bbfpa7/what_programming_languages_does_godot_support/ekit44q/ https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/bbfpa7/what_programm...

disease 7y ago

Supporting the web target for c# is a HUGE deal for me as someone that makes hobbyist game jam projects and doesn't want to learn another language (already know c#, not thrilled about learning GDScript). I can't understate how much of a big deal the growing support for c# is. Both for non-game devs who want to dip their feet in making games and also luring in current Unity developers.

csdreamer7 7y ago
GDScript is just Python that has some tweaks. For example to preload a child node you put this in a node's member space. onready var enemy = $Enemy Variables needing to be declared with the var keyword is the biggest change in the language. var flag = some_function_result() Other changes include expanding Python with more keywords useful for the editor and game programming. It is very nice for prototyping. Still looking forward to that C# AOT support in later releases.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  It doesn't have lambda, even the bad lambda from python.
  - aaronsnoswell 7y ago
    This is an intentional design decision in the language - not having lambda functions / functions as first-class citizens makes the code easier to optimize internally.
    - vincent-toups 7y ago
      It also makes me feel like I'm programming in 1987. LuaJIT does fine with lambdas and I'd bet good money chibi-scheme is faster than GDScript. Its not a really good excuse.

rcarmo 7y ago

Need to try it ASAP, although I see the issue that prevented my kids from using it (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/24890 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/24890) is still open - managed accounts present a few challenges, but I hope this has been sorted somehow.

klohto 7y ago
Would running it inside a container and creating shortcut for your kids be a possible workaround?
- rcarmo 7y ago
  On a Mac? No.

electronstudio 7y ago

When I started developing RetroWar[1], I found Unity quite a disappointment, and so I developed my own custom engine in Kotlin. It works very well, but it took several years. Recently I tried Godot because I was looking for something simple I could teach to kids[2], and I was amazed how easy it makes game creation. I made these games with no experience in just a couple of days! https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_racing https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_racing https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_space https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_space GDscript is great. It's similar enough to Python that kids who know Python won't notice much difference, and it actually simplifies things for beginners, e.g. you can use objects without the need to define classes because they are created automatically when you create a script. Godot is still a little rough around the edges, e.g. not everything has keyboard shortcuts, sometimes it crashes, some of the built in tools like map editor are very fiddly to use. But it's open source so I'm sure they will be fixed eventually (and if they aren't I can always do it myself.) The only major issue I can see for the future of Godot is the lack of exporters for Xbox, Playstation and Switch. [1] http://retrowar.net http://retrowar.net [2] https://loughton.me.uk/2020/01/22/godot.html https://loughton.me.uk/2020/01/22/godot.html

olsonjeffery 7y ago
*lack of public exporters. Because of the NDAs around shipping for these platforms, no one can "advertise" that they have the exporters, but the truth is that there are consultants/gamedev shops who have done this work for all of the current platforms. You just have to get in touch with them via the community. EDIT: This page has some backstory: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
- electronstudio 7y ago
  Sure you can hire someone to do the port - they do advertise it on that very page. But there is another open source game library, Monogame, that distributes their code for free for consoles. You just have to vertify that you are have signed the NDA before you get access to the code. They advertise this. So there is no reason that Godot couldn't do the same if they wanted to open that code.

zubspace 7y ago

Been playing around with the Release Candidate, coming from Unity. Here's a list of things which I like / dislike: ++ Open License and friendly community. ++ The scene graph (node tree / prefabs) is well done, better than Unity. You can easily switch between scenes (Prefabs) through tabs and convert subtrees to separate scenes. Nesting scenes works really well. ++ The inbuilt scripting documentation is great. - C# is not fully there, yet. No Visual studio integration. Debugging through VSCode is a pain. WebAssembly Exports are not optimized yet. That's why I sticked with GDScript. + GDScript is a nice language with optional type hinting. But refactoring can mostly be done through search/replace. ++ Windows and HTML/WebGL exports are super fast. I did not have problems since the RC. - The inbuilt editor for GDScripts is ok. But I'm missing my VIM shortcuts... - Arrays, dictionaries are not generic. Enums are not typesafe either. Bit me a few times. - You cannot inspect the scene in the editor visually while debugging. This is what I miss the most coming from unity. Some things are really hard to debug this way, for example if you use procedural generation. - 2D coords starting at the top left corner of the screen and increasing right/down is really confusing. If the player jumps, y goes down. It's a bit strange. - I'm a bit afraid regarding the +5000 open issues on github. I wonder, how they will handle that in the future...

_def 7y ago
> 2D coords starting at the top left corner of the screen and increasing right/down is really confusing. If the player jumps, y goes down. It's a bit strange. Where do the coords start in Unity? Just curious
- zubspace 7y ago
  In Unity up is +y, down is -y. In Godot it's reversed, I guess because screen updates usually start at the top left corner of the screen.
  - Insanity 7y ago
    It's reversed in most places historically. 0,0 is top-left. I think unity is the odd one here

cdiamand 7y ago

I stumbled upon Godot after seeing (and buying) https://store.steampowered.com/app/1189230/Door_in_the_Woods/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1189230/Door_in_the_Woods... It's an ascii roguelike with a neat 3d aesthetic. Godot was a pleasure to install and play around with it. I recommend taking a look!

xwowsersx 7y ago

My son (10 years old) wants to learn how to make games so we sat down together and went through the tutorial from the beginning. Very enjoyable.

keyle 7y ago
Nice! I made a tiny game with a car for my 3 year old and he's already asking me "how do I do this too"...
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  Awesome! Nice to be able to share the joy of programming using an activity kids already love.

malkia 7y ago

The UI looks really polished, but it's missing one crucial feature - multi-monitor ("window") support - with docking.

woollysammoth 7y ago

I've been working with Godot/Websockets lately and it has been really enjoyable -- excited for Juan's 4.0 vulkan work!

somebodythere 7y ago

I am refreshed by Godot's versioning scheme. Point releases are something to get excited about.

jokoon 7y ago

I tried to learn it a little but I did not manage to understand how it works, I don't really like the whole WYSIWYG thing, it forces the developer to surrender control, and you waste a big amount of time teaching yourself how it works internally, time that could be spent being productive with a simple renderer. It also seems to support c++ as "gdnative", although it requires another compiler to link against godot's binaries. It seems awkward because you still need to use the godot editor, and there is still a lot of interfacing to write. It seems like a good alternative to unity, but in the end, all I want is an engine, not a "framework" or some awkward scene editor with some kind of Node hierarchy/interface. I could say the same thing about UE4. I hear everywhere that's it's the place to go, that "everybody uses it and it's the norm in the industry if you want to make a game from scratch", but the reality is that those frameworks are too big and too feature rich. It sounds like they want to attract young developers to lock them into those awkward frameworks, because they advertise it as being full-featured engines, but small developers might not really need to focus on bleeding edge rendering, so it doesn't make sense. I know there are engines like Ogre3D, but I would rather spend time learning an actual universal graphics API that works on all hardware, which has more value on a resume, and I can just use what I need. All other things like audio, animation, inputs, physics, etc are available as C++ libraries. Those frameworks are saying "see? you can make your own game with those tools!", but when you actually learn how a computer works, and know how to write code, you realize you want to avoid those frameworks because they conceal too much from the programmer, and usually you don't want a developer to not understand what the framework is doing. I guess this is why people have a problem with certain object-oriented practices and abstraction. EDIT: Here is a nice video which benchmarks unity against a simple, very similar from-scratch equivalent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y

unknown2374 7y ago
I think you are missing the fundamental purpose behind game engines. Game and graphics programming is really hard, and at times unapproachable to a lot of people. Moreover, in the real world, even experts prefer to use game engines just due to the fact that it is almost guaranteed that a raw renderer you write yourself is not going to be as good and optimized as a game egnine's renderer. Using game engines may not suffice to your use case, but for a lot of people that's the best way to develop games. This argument is similar to using a systems level language vs a higher level language. I myself prefer game frameworks over either raw graphics APIs and game engines, since it provides me with my preferred level of control while meeting my particular needs. I can see where you come from, if your goal is to learn and highlight that in your resume, writing and experimenting against the graphics APIs are likely the best bet. But for a lot of people, their main goal differs from yours, which is to... make a game.

ncmncm 7y ago

It took rather some poking around the site to discover that Godot is (apparently) a game engine coded in C#. Hint for people posting release announcements: you could save a great many people quite a lot of time, cumulatively, with just a single short sentence in the first paragraph of your announcement. You probably would pick up some new participants who would have given up in disgust before they could discover what the hell the thing is.

DisownedWheat 7y ago
It's not coded in C#, it's written in C++. Release notes for a new version are not the place to list all the features of the engine. You can literally click on the home page and see "Object-oriented API with language options such as GDScript, C#, C++ and visual scripting.". If people give up "in disgust" because they can't find what language the engine uses for scripting immediately in the first sentence of a release announcement then they're probably not cut out for making any kind of software which requires digging through documentation.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  So even looking around and following links, I still guessed wrong about what the hell it is. Nobody asked for, or needs, a list of "all the features" in a release announcement. Saying what the project is (such as that it is some kind of "engine", and maybe even what kind?) would have been a completely different, and much shorter and overwhelmingly more useful statement. What should motivate a reader who cannot even tell what it is to spend time groveling around to find out whether they might be interested in the thing? Hint: most projects are not interesting to most people. Forced to guess, the best guess has to be "no". I am repeatedly astonished that such elementary reasoning seems beyond so many. As it happens, for example, a game engine in C# is of zero interest to me, but one in C++ could be quite interesting. I dismissed it as a direct consequence of the failure of the announcement to give me any reason to pay it any more attention.
  - DisownedWheat 7y ago
    If having to click on the logo to go to the home page sends you into such an apoplectic rage then I don't know what to tell you. If you look at, for instance, the .NET Core 3.0 release notes[1] there is no mention in the first few paragraphs of what it is. You have to click away to see it. "I am repeatedly astonished that such elementary reasoning seems beyond so many." Perhaps you're just wrong? If everywhere you go smells like shit you should check your shoes. [1]https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-core-3-0/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-core-3-...

legostormtroopr 7y ago

I've been waiting for this! My friend and I were starting to doubt it would arrive.

eli_gottlieb 7y ago

This looks really nice. Every time I see Godot, I tell myself that one day I'll get around to making that game I dreamed up in undergrad.

WillYouFinish 7y ago

I feel like I used Godot wrong when I read these comments. I did three small games and it seemed to me that everything in Godot was put on the same complexity level. Everything is simple, but super simple tasks have become harder. And then there are inconsistencies like the sprites are not in the node tree but in another space. I don’t get it. I found it really hard to get my ideas into the engine. The low level approach would take just a fraction of the time for me.