8 ms·

Godot really seems to be taking off lately. It would be very exciting to see a true open-source competitor to Unity and Unreal. Unfortunately I think it'll be h

by _bxg1 6y ago

Godot really seems to be taking off lately. It would be very exciting to see a true open-source competitor to Unity and Unreal. Unfortunately I think it'll be held back on that front until it supports console builds, but still, it's quite an impressive endeavor considering the size of the team and the funding model.

nightowl_games 6y ago
> I think it'll be held back on that front until it supports console builds It likely won't ever directly support consoles. [1] But yes Godot is awesome and Juan is doing an extremely large public good in terms of education. I've been a gamedev for half a decade and there's still so much to learn, and godot's code base serves as an amazing resource. EDIT: link (1): https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
- rmvt 6y ago
  as someone who just picked up godot i really hope they eventually reach a point where console support is feasible.
  - nightowl_games 6y ago
    I dont know if we're on the same page here. It isn't a question of engineering time. It's a legal problem. It's not going to become feasible in the way ordinary problems do. There's a couple companies out there that will port your game to consoles for you. [1] (1): http://www.lonewolftechnology.com/ http://www.lonewolftechnology.com/
    - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
      If Godot becomes big, you can bet vendors would contact Godot to include support for their systems (under NDA).
      - CJKinni 6y ago
        The issue here is that Godot isn't someone you can contact to support their systems. It's an open source project. They either add it to the source, which they can't because of NDAs, or they point you to companies who have a track record of porting and publishing Godot games on Switch, PS4 and Xbox One, which they are currently doing: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
        jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
        Open source projects can definitely be contacted in most cases (including Godot) and anybody can fork the project to support a given console. Vendors can publish such support under NDA.
        backpropaganda 6y ago
        FNA, Monogame, Heaps, Kha, and many other open source engines have closed source forks supporting consoles.
        bananaboy 6y ago
        It's feasible that they could do the work themselves and only allow access to a branch or patches for console to folks who have signed the NDA. This is basically how Epic works with Unreal. The Unreal source code is available for anyone to look at on github, but it doesn't include any console-specific code.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - georgeecollins 6y ago
    Also, if there is enough of a market for it, someone can maintain a version of Godot as a company (like RedHat) and then you can use that version for consoles, although obviously at some cost. If Godot grows, that could be an interesting business for someone on HN. I really like Godot. It's not as full featured as other engines but it feels very logical and clear.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    Technically speaking, improvements to the Vulkan renderer like this are not beneficial to the two major consoles that do not bother supporting Vulkan. The console manufacturers need to get with the program if you want to have any chance of running cross-platform code on there. As long as most studios remain reliant on the small handful of middleware companies (Unreal, Unity) to supply these abstraction layers for them, then this likely won't change. The Switch does support Vulkan but it still leads to the problem of the walled-garden and NDAs which has already been discussed here at length, and also prevents any further abstraction layers for consoles from being developed by anyone besides these approved middleware companies. If the open source aspect is important to you then I would suggest avoiding these walled-garden consoles completely.
    - Arelius 6y ago
      Lightmapping is mostly a bunch of higher-level infrastructure that is mostly portable between rendering APIs, there is often some additional amount of work that has to be done per API but I generally expect it to be minimal. I don't think the console manufacturers have many incentives to work too hard on supporting these shared APIs. Their business models make it much more valuable to provide higher performing and more specialized code that works better on their console. And that price generally ends up being pretty small and well worth it for a team maintaining their own engine. And that math only becomes more insignificant the more teams are switching to the main engines such as Unity and Unreal.
      - cycloptic 6y ago
        Of course lightmapping is just one part, but the major focus of the 4.0 release is the entirety of the Vulkan backend. There is a lot more code there than just this. I don't think your second paragraph is quite true and it's only because Vulkan is already supported on one of the consoles (Switch) and has been promoted by them for years as a way to make it easier for PC developers to port their games. There are also things like MoltenVK (which was a prime motivator for Vulkan support in Godot) that prove that there is some demand AND that other companies are willing to pay the expense of maintaining it, so it's not something that has to cut into their business model or mess with other products either.
  - Mikeb85 6y ago
    You can publish to consoles with Godot. The issue is that the console makers don't give anyone access to their API without being officially licensed developers (and signing an NDA) so there's no public export templates. However there are several companies that help with this and I believe the Godot devs do as well if you can prove you're a licensed developer.
- rozab 6y ago
  I don't quite understand so I'll just invoke Cunningham's Law: Why couldn't the SFC, or whatever foundation springs up to run things, publish binary blobs for making builds? I don't see why the open source nature of the project would be an obstacle.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Presumably the console manufacturers would not allow this. They want more control than that and don't want licensees acting as a sort of sub-licensor and building things for people like this. You have to sign agreements with the console manufacturers - they get to set any rules the market will support.
  - Mikeb85 6y ago
    The console makers require that developers sign an NDA before gaining access to their API.
    - edflsafoiewq 6y ago
      Why?
      - Mikeb85 6y ago
        Why don't you ask them? If I were to guess, I'd say it's to prevent both piracy as well as games being sold from 3rd party markets.
      - franga2000 6y ago
        To make sure no one can make games for their platforms without their permission and agreeing to their terms. If the platform was open, anyone could make anything and sell it in any way they wanted - so how would they squeeze more money out of them for themselves?
        lukevp 6y ago
        If you look at the history of consoles, many are sold at very thin margins, or even at a loss, not even including R&D, distribution, etc. just purely from a component cost standpoint. They recoup these costs using revenue from the game sales and the online play features. It’s not a squeezing money kind of thing. For example, the next gen of consoles is probably going to be in the $500 range, and includes pcie4 speed 1tb SSDs. I bought one of these for my new machine and it was about $200 alone. Add in the processor, ram, motherboard, case, optical drive, etc. and these systems are not making tons of profit.
TAForObvReasons 6y ago
NDAs and other factors prohibit a truly open source release with direct support for official console APIs. Companies like http://lonewolftechnology.com/ http://lonewolftechnology.com/ help developers launch on consoles. On the unofficial side, https://github.com/Stary2001/godot https://github.com/Stary2001/godot is a godot port that runs on the standard nintendo switch homebrew stack
- whateveracct 6y ago
  So if I write some console APIs in my niche language (say, Haskell) and get that language building for said console..I can't share it with anyone? Or can I share it so long as the sharee also is NDA'd? (e.g. have a public stub repo where people with credentials can get free access to the private repo per NDA)
  - dmytroi 6y ago
    You can only share them via private forums hosted by consoles parent companies, like siedev.net, developer.nintendo.com and similar. Direct sharing/selling of middleware/code between companies is usually fully forbidden.
    - _bxg1 6y ago
      It's wild to me that even just the API would be so controlled. Is it not enough that they control signing of the software? Does this not shoot them in the foot when it comes to courting developers?
      - bathtub365 6y ago
        Consoles have huge potential audiences if you want to make money off your games.
      - bsanr2 6y ago
        Layman here, but IIUC it's the exact opposite. Nintendo in particular had massive problems with crapware and knockoff devs adopting the traditional 70s/80s PC game distribution paradigms, if you know what I mean. It was difficult to tell what was a genuine, high-quality purchase. Locking down development is apparently one of the reasons they won out over Atari. We're in a different world today, but 2/3rds of the major console market is Japanese, and the business culture there is supposedly very cautious about reapproaching things that have burnt the company in the past.
hanoz 6y ago
You may as well stick with Unity and Unreal if you need support for console builds because from what I hear there's no point in waiting for Godot.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
- ludamad 6y ago
  Or you use a company who specializes in this
- swivelmaster 6y ago
  You snuck a very good joke into this comment.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    It's not a coincidence, this joke is actually the namesake of the project. https://godotengine.org/article/godot-history-images https://godotengine.org/article/godot-history-images
- guevara 6y ago
  +1 for reference
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  monogame can target a lot of consoles as well.
noidexe 6y ago
> Unfortunately I think it'll be held back on that front until it supports console builds I think the Godot devs have not been clear enough communicating about console support. There are export templates ready to use, up to date and fully working on different consoles. They just can't be offered as part of the open source engine due to legal reasons. That actually applies to other engines too. In the case of Unity, to build for Switch you need to download the required software from the Nintendo Developers portal and it's only accessible to you if you get approved as a developer. If Nintendo wishes to do the same with Godot they can do it know since there are no technical or legal impediments. Since Nintendo hasn't done it so far and the Godot team can't do it for legal reasons, it falls to third parties to do it. One of those is Lone Worlf Technology LLC, owned by one of the co-founders of the engine, so it's as official as it can get. If you don't want to work with them you now have a second option that's called Pineapple Works. It's not like you have to pay a company to port your game to switch from scratch. I think many people get that idea. Edit: orthography Edit2: Just to clarify even further. If you check the process to build for switch using Unreal you'll see that the process is exactly the same as with Godot, the only difference being that in the case of Unreal it's the same company providing the base engine and the switch export tools. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/launch-your-game-on-the-nintendo-switch-with-unreal-engine-4-16 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/launch-your-game-on-...
- _bxg1 6y ago
  That's great to know about, thank you!
- AgentME 6y ago
  >It's not like you have to pay a company to port your game to switch from scratch. I think many people get that idea. Your reply is a really good one because I totally got this impression from the other replies here! So Godot isn't fundamentally incompatible with consoles, it's just the open source part of it that is.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    I think it's more just that you have to go grab the console piece separately, in the same way that Ubuntu can't include the mp3 codec as part of its distribution even though you can trivially go and install it yourself for free
shmerl 6y ago
Console development is sickening with all the NDAs and such, so it's hard to combine their dinosaur approach with normal open development model. Console makers really should switch to the new century already and drop all their NDA garbage.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  No thanks, we already have enough garbage on iOS, Play Store, Steam and HTML 5 gaming web sites.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    The consoles have enough garbage as well. Like "life of black tiger" which is a bad console port of a horrible mobile game. Its trailer is featured on the official PlayStation channel even though it's apparently using copyrighted background music without permission. Nobody knows why Sony allowed this all to happen. But to be fair the Play Store definitely has more of such low-quality games.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Yes, the quality net has holes in it, and since 1983 not all decisions were done correctly. Yet it is still better than not having a net at all, leading to a bunch of "Hello World" games, half finished game demos, copy cats that dilute branding. Alone on iOS there are around 3000 submissions per month on average, even taking around 50% away for updates, it still leaves us with an enormous amount of low quality games to triage, per month. https://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/submissions/ https://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/submissions/ Not even the modern variants of Crash!, YourSinclar, Amiga Format can keep up with such submission rate.
      - cycloptic 6y ago
        I don't buy that as a justification to create a walled-garden. Curation and quality control don't require locking everything down; it doesn't make the manual review process any less expensive. What it does do is make it less expensive to exert total control over the associated branding. This might seem like a good thing for customers if this branding wasn't already for sale to the the highest bidder, but it is. The practice of hardware manufacturers paying for exclusives proves this.
Thaxll 6y ago
It's not just console support, 3d on Godot is bad compare to other engines. I mean it's really not on part for serious games. It's far far behind Unity and Unreal.
vkaku 6y ago
Open source and consoles won't mix unless they remove the licensing (they won't). Which is why the Unreal model keeps platforms modular and has a bot to sync code back to GH. The reality of open source in games is we need more engine sponsors from the studios running those engines in order to keep development alive. Console driven development should also come from the studios, and they should partner with GoDot to enable packs/modules/tools. Blender successfully navigated this with the open movies project. The game engines need a similar model.

by _bxg1 6y ago

nightowl_games 6y ago

> I think it'll be held back on that front until it supports console builds It likely won't ever directly support consoles. [1] But yes Godot is awesome and Juan is doing an extremely large public good in terms of education. I've been a gamedev for half a decade and there's still so much to learn, and godot's code base serves as an amazing resource. EDIT: link (1): https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...

rmvt 6y ago
as someone who just picked up godot i really hope they eventually reach a point where console support is feasible.
- nightowl_games 6y ago
  I dont know if we're on the same page here. It isn't a question of engineering time. It's a legal problem. It's not going to become feasible in the way ordinary problems do. There's a couple companies out there that will port your game to consoles for you. [1] (1): http://www.lonewolftechnology.com/ http://www.lonewolftechnology.com/
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    If Godot becomes big, you can bet vendors would contact Godot to include support for their systems (under NDA).
    - CJKinni 6y ago
      The issue here is that Godot isn't someone you can contact to support their systems. It's an open source project. They either add it to the source, which they can't because of NDAs, or they point you to companies who have a track record of porting and publishing Godot games on Switch, PS4 and Xbox One, which they are currently doing: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
      - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
        Open source projects can definitely be contacted in most cases (including Godot) and anybody can fork the project to support a given console. Vendors can publish such support under NDA.
      - backpropaganda 6y ago
        FNA, Monogame, Heaps, Kha, and many other open source engines have closed source forks supporting consoles.
      - bananaboy 6y ago
        It's feasible that they could do the work themselves and only allow access to a branch or patches for console to folks who have signed the NDA. This is basically how Epic works with Unreal. The Unreal source code is available for anyone to look at on github, but it doesn't include any console-specific code.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  Also, if there is enough of a market for it, someone can maintain a version of Godot as a company (like RedHat) and then you can use that version for consoles, although obviously at some cost. If Godot grows, that could be an interesting business for someone on HN. I really like Godot. It's not as full featured as other engines but it feels very logical and clear.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  Technically speaking, improvements to the Vulkan renderer like this are not beneficial to the two major consoles that do not bother supporting Vulkan. The console manufacturers need to get with the program if you want to have any chance of running cross-platform code on there. As long as most studios remain reliant on the small handful of middleware companies (Unreal, Unity) to supply these abstraction layers for them, then this likely won't change. The Switch does support Vulkan but it still leads to the problem of the walled-garden and NDAs which has already been discussed here at length, and also prevents any further abstraction layers for consoles from being developed by anyone besides these approved middleware companies. If the open source aspect is important to you then I would suggest avoiding these walled-garden consoles completely.
  - Arelius 6y ago
    Lightmapping is mostly a bunch of higher-level infrastructure that is mostly portable between rendering APIs, there is often some additional amount of work that has to be done per API but I generally expect it to be minimal. I don't think the console manufacturers have many incentives to work too hard on supporting these shared APIs. Their business models make it much more valuable to provide higher performing and more specialized code that works better on their console. And that price generally ends up being pretty small and well worth it for a team maintaining their own engine. And that math only becomes more insignificant the more teams are switching to the main engines such as Unity and Unreal.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      Of course lightmapping is just one part, but the major focus of the 4.0 release is the entirety of the Vulkan backend. There is a lot more code there than just this. I don't think your second paragraph is quite true and it's only because Vulkan is already supported on one of the consoles (Switch) and has been promoted by them for years as a way to make it easier for PC developers to port their games. There are also things like MoltenVK (which was a prime motivator for Vulkan support in Godot) that prove that there is some demand AND that other companies are willing to pay the expense of maintaining it, so it's not something that has to cut into their business model or mess with other products either.
- Mikeb85 6y ago
  You can publish to consoles with Godot. The issue is that the console makers don't give anyone access to their API without being officially licensed developers (and signing an NDA) so there's no public export templates. However there are several companies that help with this and I believe the Godot devs do as well if you can prove you're a licensed developer.
rozab 6y ago
I don't quite understand so I'll just invoke Cunningham's Law: Why couldn't the SFC, or whatever foundation springs up to run things, publish binary blobs for making builds? I don't see why the open source nature of the project would be an obstacle.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Presumably the console manufacturers would not allow this. They want more control than that and don't want licensees acting as a sort of sub-licensor and building things for people like this. You have to sign agreements with the console manufacturers - they get to set any rules the market will support.
- Mikeb85 6y ago
  The console makers require that developers sign an NDA before gaining access to their API.
  - edflsafoiewq 6y ago
    Why?
    - Mikeb85 6y ago
      Why don't you ask them? If I were to guess, I'd say it's to prevent both piracy as well as games being sold from 3rd party markets.
    - franga2000 6y ago
      To make sure no one can make games for their platforms without their permission and agreeing to their terms. If the platform was open, anyone could make anything and sell it in any way they wanted - so how would they squeeze more money out of them for themselves?
      - lukevp 6y ago
        If you look at the history of consoles, many are sold at very thin margins, or even at a loss, not even including R&D, distribution, etc. just purely from a component cost standpoint. They recoup these costs using revenue from the game sales and the online play features. It’s not a squeezing money kind of thing. For example, the next gen of consoles is probably going to be in the $500 range, and includes pcie4 speed 1tb SSDs. I bought one of these for my new machine and it was about $200 alone. Add in the processor, ram, motherboard, case, optical drive, etc. and these systems are not making tons of profit.

TAForObvReasons 6y ago

NDAs and other factors prohibit a truly open source release with direct support for official console APIs. Companies like http://lonewolftechnology.com/ http://lonewolftechnology.com/ help developers launch on consoles. On the unofficial side, https://github.com/Stary2001/godot https://github.com/Stary2001/godot is a godot port that runs on the standard nintendo switch homebrew stack

whateveracct 6y ago
So if I write some console APIs in my niche language (say, Haskell) and get that language building for said console..I can't share it with anyone? Or can I share it so long as the sharee also is NDA'd? (e.g. have a public stub repo where people with credentials can get free access to the private repo per NDA)
- dmytroi 6y ago
  You can only share them via private forums hosted by consoles parent companies, like siedev.net, developer.nintendo.com and similar. Direct sharing/selling of middleware/code between companies is usually fully forbidden.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    It's wild to me that even just the API would be so controlled. Is it not enough that they control signing of the software? Does this not shoot them in the foot when it comes to courting developers?
    - bathtub365 6y ago
      Consoles have huge potential audiences if you want to make money off your games.
    - bsanr2 6y ago
      Layman here, but IIUC it's the exact opposite. Nintendo in particular had massive problems with crapware and knockoff devs adopting the traditional 70s/80s PC game distribution paradigms, if you know what I mean. It was difficult to tell what was a genuine, high-quality purchase. Locking down development is apparently one of the reasons they won out over Atari. We're in a different world today, but 2/3rds of the major console market is Japanese, and the business culture there is supposedly very cautious about reapproaching things that have burnt the company in the past.

hanoz 6y ago

You may as well stick with Unity and Unreal if you need support for console builds because from what I hear there's no point in waiting for Godot.

microcolonel 6y ago
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
ludamad 6y ago
Or you use a company who specializes in this
swivelmaster 6y ago
You snuck a very good joke into this comment.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  It's not a coincidence, this joke is actually the namesake of the project. https://godotengine.org/article/godot-history-images https://godotengine.org/article/godot-history-images
guevara 6y ago
+1 for reference
gameswithgo 6y ago
monogame can target a lot of consoles as well.

noidexe 6y ago

> Unfortunately I think it'll be held back on that front until it supports console builds I think the Godot devs have not been clear enough communicating about console support. There are export templates ready to use, up to date and fully working on different consoles. They just can't be offered as part of the open source engine due to legal reasons. That actually applies to other engines too. In the case of Unity, to build for Switch you need to download the required software from the Nintendo Developers portal and it's only accessible to you if you get approved as a developer. If Nintendo wishes to do the same with Godot they can do it know since there are no technical or legal impediments. Since Nintendo hasn't done it so far and the Godot team can't do it for legal reasons, it falls to third parties to do it. One of those is Lone Worlf Technology LLC, owned by one of the co-founders of the engine, so it's as official as it can get. If you don't want to work with them you now have a second option that's called Pineapple Works. It's not like you have to pay a company to port your game to switch from scratch. I think many people get that idea. Edit: orthography Edit2: Just to clarify even further. If you check the process to build for switch using Unreal you'll see that the process is exactly the same as with Godot, the only difference being that in the case of Unreal it's the same company providing the base engine and the switch export tools. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/launch-your-game-on-the-nintendo-switch-with-unreal-engine-4-16 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/launch-your-game-on-...

_bxg1 6y ago
That's great to know about, thank you!
AgentME 6y ago
>It's not like you have to pay a company to port your game to switch from scratch. I think many people get that idea. Your reply is a really good one because I totally got this impression from the other replies here! So Godot isn't fundamentally incompatible with consoles, it's just the open source part of it that is.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  I think it's more just that you have to go grab the console piece separately, in the same way that Ubuntu can't include the mp3 codec as part of its distribution even though you can trivially go and install it yourself for free

shmerl 6y ago

Console development is sickening with all the NDAs and such, so it's hard to combine their dinosaur approach with normal open development model. Console makers really should switch to the new century already and drop all their NDA garbage.

pjmlp 6y ago
No thanks, we already have enough garbage on iOS, Play Store, Steam and HTML 5 gaming web sites.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  The consoles have enough garbage as well. Like "life of black tiger" which is a bad console port of a horrible mobile game. Its trailer is featured on the official PlayStation channel even though it's apparently using copyrighted background music without permission. Nobody knows why Sony allowed this all to happen. But to be fair the Play Store definitely has more of such low-quality games.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Yes, the quality net has holes in it, and since 1983 not all decisions were done correctly. Yet it is still better than not having a net at all, leading to a bunch of "Hello World" games, half finished game demos, copy cats that dilute branding. Alone on iOS there are around 3000 submissions per month on average, even taking around 50% away for updates, it still leaves us with an enormous amount of low quality games to triage, per month. https://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/submissions/ https://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/submissions/ Not even the modern variants of Crash!, YourSinclar, Amiga Format can keep up with such submission rate.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      I don't buy that as a justification to create a walled-garden. Curation and quality control don't require locking everything down; it doesn't make the manual review process any less expensive. What it does do is make it less expensive to exert total control over the associated branding. This might seem like a good thing for customers if this branding wasn't already for sale to the the highest bidder, but it is. The practice of hardware manufacturers paying for exclusives proves this.

Thaxll 6y ago

It's not just console support, 3d on Godot is bad compare to other engines. I mean it's really not on part for serious games. It's far far behind Unity and Unreal.

vkaku 6y ago

Open source and consoles won't mix unless they remove the licensing (they won't). Which is why the Unreal model keeps platforms modular and has a bot to sync code back to GH. The reality of open source in games is we need more engine sponsors from the studios running those engines in order to keep development alive. Console driven development should also come from the studios, and they should partner with GoDot to enable packs/modules/tools. Blender successfully navigated this with the open movies project. The game engines need a similar model.