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Godot Editor running in a web browser

424 points by SquareWheel 6y ago

msie 6y ago
Godot is such an amazing/polished game engine. I like it a lot more than Unity (at least for 2D).
- xrd 6y ago
  I clicked on the doc link from within the native editor. It is less of a tutorial than I had hoped. Do you have a suggestion for getting started with it?
  - jszymborski 6y ago
    The step by step docs have been very useful for me: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_by_step/index.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_... If you're a "work bacwards from a finished project" kind of person, this tutorial is quite great as well https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_by_step/your_first_game.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_...
    - xrd 6y ago
      That's great. And, I love that the examples all specify /home/ubuntu as the home directory, so the author is clearly using Linux. This is really cool.
      - hnick 6y ago
        Yes "Your First Game" is a fine place to start even if it tells you to read some other things first. I'm a big fan of diving in to get something running, then searching or backtracking to learn the fundamentals if you need to. There were a couple of typos in there that I ran into, it shouldn't be too hard with a little programming experience to notice these. I didn't download the finished files because I think typing it out is a much richer learning experience.
  - truncate 6y ago
    I recently got started by following couple videos on YouTube which are not hard to find. I've just followed very basic lessons, mainly to get familiar with non-programming aspects (scripting part is very easy if you already know programming). There is also a Humble Bundle out there right now where you can get some basic lessons as low as $1[1] [1] https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learning-game-coding-and-development?hmb_source=navbar&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=tile_index_7 https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learning-game-coding-a...
- IshKebab 6y ago
  How does it compared to Unreal? I've been using it a little to try and make a VR game and it's generally quite good I'm finding there are loads of bugs, or at least weird behaviours with materials and the OpenGL ES3 mode. And every time you change a setting it compiles like 3000 shaders which takes half an hour. Quite frustrating!
  - clarkrinker 6y ago
    One of my favorite parts about Godot is that it gets away from those crazy load times / lockup you experience in Unity/Unreal. The .import file it associates with your asset is plaintext. Definitely running into fewer merge conflicts.
    - nightowl_games 6y ago
      Ya way fewer. The scene file is actually _readable_!!!! The node and resource systems are vastly more accessible than Unity IMO. Workflow feels so much better in Godot than Unity. Godot's problems are in it's 3D renderer. It's not very performant nor good looking and has some shadow bugs... Godot 4.0 should fix all that stuff. The renderer is fine for my indie/low poly style, but is pretty limiting for advanced post processing and realistic designs. The particle system isnt very good in godot 3.x so far either. Godot has some a noticable lag spike when shaders compile as well. So, there's lots of issues related to rendering and advanced stuff, but for my purposes, godot is way more productive than Unity for me. And thats because: - the scene hierarchy has a superior design - the keyboard hotkeys are better - compilation time is non existant - hot reloading works - gdscript is faster to write than C# - scene & resource files are more git friendly - documentation is local and in-editor - gdscript has opinionated & accessible apis for things that other languages make hard (string manipulation, encryption, file system access) Godot is the future. I promise you this.
      - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
        I don't know, to me the choice of their own NotPython as the main language seems like an incredible misstep to me. It's lacking in features (last time I checked they didn't even support basic things like lambdas), tooling and libraries. There's a reason why both Unreal and Unity moved away from providing their own language.
- the_other_b 6y ago
  It's getting there, I think it's missing the top layer of polish. I've been working with it for a couple years now and it has some bugs that really hinder development speed. That being said, once those issues are fixed I think it'll be a hard choice to not use Godot (for what I do, more 2D work).
  - nightowl_games 6y ago
    > I've been working with it for a couple years now and it has some bugs that really hinder development speed. What bugs do you think hinder dev speed? I am vastly more productive in Godot than in Unity. Currently I think the only criticisms I have are the 3D renderer is bad (whoop 4.0 lets go!), and there is not a strong community/asset marketplace. I _love_ the workflow, though.
    - jay_kyburz 6y ago
      I'm a full time game dev and started a fairly large 3d project in Gotdot last September, I worked in it for about 2 months full time before moving to another project with another team. The bugs that hindered my productivity were mostly "land mines" that I discovered along the way. 1. I thought having my scripts as internal scripts sounded good for a week until I realized there are all kinds of undocumented problems with storing your scripts that way. I had to refactor. 2. There is no selection outline around mesh in the editor window. Makes it impossible to build a 3D scene in Godot. My guess is that the developers expect you to build the scene in Blender then import it as one big FBX. (But that's not ideal for some things) 3. Then I hit the dangling reference bug and that was a heavy blow to my enthusiasm. The fact you can save a reference to an object in a variable, and that the engine can then change what object your variable is pointing to under the hood. It's such a fundamental bug it makes me wonder what other massive issues are there waiting for me to run into. My work around was to listen for signals for when object references were removed from the scene and manually clearing them, but its a real drag. There were a few other things, but those ones stand out in my memory as examples of why I don't think I can work in it yet. The reference bug won't be fixed until 4.0, so have another look at Godot then. Update: Here are the bugs I logged. https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/31758 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/31758 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/32383 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/32383
- turova 6y ago
  One thing that I think would hugely shift godot's market share is a standardized asset format, similar to what Unity and Unreal have, so asset developers could offer assets in Godot-compatible format. It would be even more amazing if there was an easy way to import Unity resources. Maybe I just needed to do more research, but last time I tried, I had to pull out individual files, mess around with them in Blender, then import the model and the mesh into Godot separately, where I needed to arrange them together afterward. I think if the asset management was as simple as Unity's, Godot would be a no-brainer in many projects, especially smaller ones.
  - lux 6y ago
    As long as it doesn't follow Unity's approach (asset bundles). Unity's favourite thing to do is break asset bundle compatibility between versions.
  - nightowl_games 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. Godot has asset formats that translate from project to project.
    - turova 6y ago
      I've used both Unity and Godot at a hobby level and what I found was that with Unity, I spent almost all my time playing around with game mechanics. With Godot, I always spent a considerable amount of time importing resources and fiddling with them before being able to do anything useful other than add basic shapes to the screen. I think it's probably a problem of being the underdog with a much smaller asset market, but that's literally the one thing that made Unity worth checking out for me. I've downloaded most releases of Godot to play around with them as they come out though, so I'm really excited about it growing further.
      - nightowl_games 6y ago
        There are some issues with the 3D importing pipeline, GLTF is the best supported file format, but they recently added .fbx support so thats good. I agree that there could be further improvements made there but I've had good luck with .gltf. Additionally, I've had problems with materials or animations importing into Unity as well. Seems like its a big, common problem. Unity imports started getting smoother in recent years because marketplaces and artists started specifically targeting unity.
- Thaxll 6y ago
  Godot is a bad 3d engine, performance is abysmal.
- hnick 6y ago
  Yes I downloaded it last week. I got bored doing a Unity tutorial (how to best explain ... what I was doing all felt a bit disconnected from the games I guess?). I dived right into the Godot tutorial "Your first game"[0] and had something basic running really quickly and I understood most of it without any further reading. [0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_by_step/your_first_game.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_...
- insulanus 6y ago
  Wow. I just downloaded and installed it (on Linux). Hands down the best install experience of any similar tool. * Unzip one binary and run it. * The app auto-detects everything you need, and uses the best version it finds * Its project layout requirements are "open an empty directory" * The example projects install and work! Seriously, the biggest difficulty I had was finding the "run project" button. It took me a little bit of hunting.
antoineMoPa 6y ago
I wonder when firefox will re enable SharedArrayBuffer.
- jszymborski 6y ago
  Seeing as it's available in Firefox Nightly, it'd imagine it'd be in the next release provided it doesn't present any problems from then and now.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    A feature introduced in e.g. Nightly 78 might stay out of stable until say version 86. That is features make it to stable by becoming stable not because it first landed in a certain nightly and so everything was held up until all features in that nightly became stable. Releases happen on a fixed 4 week calendar cycle instead. Based on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1563480 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1563480 I'd say it's probably a good number of releases away.
    - hoten 6y ago
      Here's some context you didn't ask for, but hope you find it helpful. There's standardization work being done to enable SAB behind a new security context. Mozilla has a good summary: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/SharedArrayBuffer/Planned_changes https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... At the moment, I think only Chromium enables SAB by default for devices that have "Site Isolation" enabled (avoids spectre attacks by using process isolation). That's a browser feature specific to Chromium, and is disable for some low-memory devices, so it's not universal. I'm not familiar with how far along Chromium or Firefox are. If you're interested in using SAB, start reading up on COOP and COEP. Source: I work on web tooling at Chrome.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Which is a pity, Firefox has already landed on "nice to have" on our browser matrix, and these kind of decisions don't help.
t0astbread 6y ago
I'm still amazed how small the Godot editor is (last time I checked it was ~25MB). Just how are they able to pack this much functionality into such little space?
- gjkood 6y ago
  I guess its all relative. In the late 80s I was impressed by a full Wordstar compatible text editor for Turbo Pascal which only occupied 25K (including the compiler). Times have indeed changed.
  - nightowl_games 6y ago
    A lot of the godot size is the images it packs in itself. When I cloned the godot repo, I could understand the architecture just by the file names. I started falling in love with it as the easily understandable file names started streaming down from the cloud. It's truly a public good.
    - gnulinux 6y ago
      > A lot of the godot size is the images it packs in itself. For comparison, emacs's installed size is 76K [1]. [1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/emacs https://packages.debian.org/sid/emacs
      - yepguy 6y ago
        That's the installed size of the metapackage containing no emacs executable, no elisp files, and no documentation. On my system the emacs executable is 39M and the entire installed package is 128M. (Additionally, my Doom Emacs folder takes up another 840M.)
        gnulinux 6y ago
        Ah so sorry about that. I should have checked.
        6y ago
z3t4 6y ago
It's amazing that a native Windows/Mac app can be compiled to run in a web browser. However Web-assembly does not mean better performance. A native browser app would most likely be faster.
- nightowl_games 6y ago
  What do you mean by native browser app? Like JS + WebGL?
  - snazz 6y ago
    I'm guessing that an app written for WebAssembly in the first place would be faster than an app written for the desktop when they're both running in the browser.
  - z3t4 6y ago
    JS is usually not the bottleneck in web apps. The bottleneck is most of the time rendering. Rewriting the app in JS would make it faster then the Webassembly version. It's a common misconception that Webassembly is faster then JS. Although theoretically possible, the compiler wouldn't be able to beat a skilled JS developer's hand written JS specific for the web platform. A turtle is faster then a rabbit - in water.
    - andai 6y ago
      Is this true? I was under the impression that webassembly was capable of faster performance than JS, and thinking about learning a compiled languages to make my web applications faster. Would that be a waste of time?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - z3t4 6y ago
        It would not be a waste of time if you learned something. Here's a quick exercise: Write an "hello world" app and compile it to WebAssembly. Then open browser dev tools to inspect the app. You will see that a middle layer is needed to put that "hello world" on the screen. Just like JS, WebAssembly can't talk directly to the hardware and need to use the same browser API's as JS. Besides obfuscating and being able to compile desktop apps to the web platform, one use-case for WebAssembly that might bring an performance improvement is to use it for something you currently use a Web Worker for. For example sending a bit buffer to the worker, have it do some work on it, and send it back. There is however a penalty to sending the data back and forth, although there are work being done that allows shared memory, which will make both JS and Web-assembly faster. JavaScript is compiled to optimized native code. So you will get away with really stupid code - the optimizer will make it fast. But the more you learn, you will be able to write even faster apps. It really doesn't matter what programming language you use, it's more important to have experience and tribal knowledge of the platform you are targeting. A funny thing about performance is that the more you know, the slower your app could become. If you for example use highly sophisticated abstractions, make use of frameworks and preprocessors, together with an orchestra of cloud functions and services with IPC message across oceans - then it will be slow. If you want performance - just keep it simple.
skybrian 6y ago
I'm not a game developer but it seems like syncing with a standard git repo would be ideal. Is that possible with games or do the assets prevent it?
- anderspitman 6y ago
  Your intuition is correct. git alone isn't going to cut it for the assets.
- slezyr 6y ago
  git lfs plugin should help with that one. IIRC Godot's editor has some support for creation of git repositories https://git-lfs.github.com/ https://git-lfs.github.com/
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  Smallish indie projects get by with git and or git lfs. git isn't really designed for binary assets and large games with terabytes of source assets usually don't use git. git's distributed nature is also an issue for non-mergable binary assets. The most common tool version control for bigger teams is perforce. It's significantly faster than git for binary files and it helps manage 2 or more people trying it edit the same binary file. There maybe be other bolt on solutions for that for git that I'm unaware of to help with that.
  - lima 6y ago
    SVN is also quite popular, it's okay at dealing with large repos.
- r0bbie 6y ago
  We use Git with LFS for our games-orientated projects, including some pretty massive projects, and have found it works really well. We previously used SVN for similar projects, and made the switch to Git once LFS made it a feasible choice for projects with lots of large binary assets (games), and honestly never looked back, it's massively improved our workflow.
anderspitman 6y ago
This is awesome. Question: everything I've read[0] about WebDAV indicates tons of compatibility problems between implementations, even those built into operating systems. I wonder what the plan is to deal with that? Also, are there any off-the-shelf WebDAV client libraries for browsers? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10213657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10213657
stakkur 6y ago
I've been waiting for this.
andai 6y ago
I get a black screen and the JS error "Atomics is not defined." Did we overload it?
- shortercode 6y ago
  Atomics is part of the threading APIs, I'm guessing your browser doesn't support it. Although I feel like you should get a better error message...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - john4532452 6y ago
    That's strange, this project is funded by mozilla and does not run on latest firefox
    - rewq4321 6y ago
      It says in the blog post you need to use Firefox Nightly
oknoorap 6y ago
Godot is truly real competitor to unity in OSS world, good job, I'll waiting this feature until it's not buggy.
msla 6y ago
Is the wait nearly over? BTW, how do they pronounce the name?
- maxeonyx 6y ago
  "goh-doh" or "goh-doht" The 'o's are pronounced the same.
rawoke083600 6y ago
Honest question.. Is this "just" the way modern gamedev is being done. With these "Editors For Scenes" ? Like the Unity and Unreal Editors ? Not hating just asking last time I "checked in" on gamedev was prob one or two decades ago and had a lot of fun with IrrLicht and Ogre. Does this "editor approach" not get in the way ? Just looking in as an outsider with almost zero gamedev experience.. don't you end up fighting the editor to just get things done ? Again don't flame me I have no idea what I'm talking about :) PS. GoDot looks great :)
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  Partly it depends on the game but I think both Unity and Unreal, and I assume Godot, expect that the editor is just a framework and you're expected to extend them to whatever special needs your game has.
  - SquareWheel 6y ago
    Godot is particularly good at extending the editor. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/misc/running_code_in_the_editor.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/misc/runnin...
- oap_bram 6y ago
  Hey software engineer/gamedev here. I use Godot daily to make games for small businesses, usually around GPS-based games. What I really found is that the editor based approach of Godot actually doesn't get in the way, but is actually way closer to the DSL of a game designer. Also the way of making nodes/scenes with signals in Godot promotes making systems that are very loosely coupled, so I haven't ran into any big problems with the engine when it comes to maintainability of projects. And when I want to extend the engine with some native features like Android camera feed (which I'm preparing a PR for somewhere in the future), I can just dig into the code, no need to wait for something like Unity support or something. Honestly, whether you're using this for hobby purposes or if you're dabbling in professional gamedev, this engine is worth a try.
- ajconway 6y ago
joeberon 6y ago
Kinda strange but Godot kinda feels like a game dev oriented smalltalk to me
gentleman11 6y ago
How is Godots performance these days? I heard they are adding a ton of c# support after a lot of people have struggled with frame rates in gdscript (source: various youtubers who use Godot) I just switched from unity to unreal because of sketchy retroactive licensing changes from unity and the performance in unreal is really making me happy so far
- GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
  I wrote a large scale fluid sim (like Cities Skylines' water sim) with Godot and Rust. I think the biggest bottle neck is the gdscript honestly. I had a prototype working in GDScript and after I ported it to rust I had like a 20x speed up

424 points by SquareWheel 6y ago

msie 6y ago

Godot is such an amazing/polished game engine. I like it a lot more than Unity (at least for 2D).

xrd 6y ago
I clicked on the doc link from within the native editor. It is less of a tutorial than I had hoped. Do you have a suggestion for getting started with it?
- jszymborski 6y ago
  The step by step docs have been very useful for me: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_by_step/index.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_... If you're a "work bacwards from a finished project" kind of person, this tutorial is quite great as well https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_by_step/your_first_game.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_...
  - xrd 6y ago
    That's great. And, I love that the examples all specify /home/ubuntu as the home directory, so the author is clearly using Linux. This is really cool.
    - hnick 6y ago
      Yes "Your First Game" is a fine place to start even if it tells you to read some other things first. I'm a big fan of diving in to get something running, then searching or backtracking to learn the fundamentals if you need to. There were a couple of typos in there that I ran into, it shouldn't be too hard with a little programming experience to notice these. I didn't download the finished files because I think typing it out is a much richer learning experience.
- truncate 6y ago
  I recently got started by following couple videos on YouTube which are not hard to find. I've just followed very basic lessons, mainly to get familiar with non-programming aspects (scripting part is very easy if you already know programming). There is also a Humble Bundle out there right now where you can get some basic lessons as low as $1[1] [1] https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learning-game-coding-and-development?hmb_source=navbar&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=tile_index_7 https://www.humblebundle.com/software/learning-game-coding-a...
IshKebab 6y ago
How does it compared to Unreal? I've been using it a little to try and make a VR game and it's generally quite good I'm finding there are loads of bugs, or at least weird behaviours with materials and the OpenGL ES3 mode. And every time you change a setting it compiles like 3000 shaders which takes half an hour. Quite frustrating!
- clarkrinker 6y ago
  One of my favorite parts about Godot is that it gets away from those crazy load times / lockup you experience in Unity/Unreal. The .import file it associates with your asset is plaintext. Definitely running into fewer merge conflicts.
  - nightowl_games 6y ago
    Ya way fewer. The scene file is actually _readable_!!!! The node and resource systems are vastly more accessible than Unity IMO. Workflow feels so much better in Godot than Unity. Godot's problems are in it's 3D renderer. It's not very performant nor good looking and has some shadow bugs... Godot 4.0 should fix all that stuff. The renderer is fine for my indie/low poly style, but is pretty limiting for advanced post processing and realistic designs. The particle system isnt very good in godot 3.x so far either. Godot has some a noticable lag spike when shaders compile as well. So, there's lots of issues related to rendering and advanced stuff, but for my purposes, godot is way more productive than Unity for me. And thats because: - the scene hierarchy has a superior design - the keyboard hotkeys are better - compilation time is non existant - hot reloading works - gdscript is faster to write than C# - scene & resource files are more git friendly - documentation is local and in-editor - gdscript has opinionated & accessible apis for things that other languages make hard (string manipulation, encryption, file system access) Godot is the future. I promise you this.
    - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
      I don't know, to me the choice of their own NotPython as the main language seems like an incredible misstep to me. It's lacking in features (last time I checked they didn't even support basic things like lambdas), tooling and libraries. There's a reason why both Unreal and Unity moved away from providing their own language.
the_other_b 6y ago
It's getting there, I think it's missing the top layer of polish. I've been working with it for a couple years now and it has some bugs that really hinder development speed. That being said, once those issues are fixed I think it'll be a hard choice to not use Godot (for what I do, more 2D work).
- nightowl_games 6y ago
  > I've been working with it for a couple years now and it has some bugs that really hinder development speed. What bugs do you think hinder dev speed? I am vastly more productive in Godot than in Unity. Currently I think the only criticisms I have are the 3D renderer is bad (whoop 4.0 lets go!), and there is not a strong community/asset marketplace. I _love_ the workflow, though.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    I'm a full time game dev and started a fairly large 3d project in Gotdot last September, I worked in it for about 2 months full time before moving to another project with another team. The bugs that hindered my productivity were mostly "land mines" that I discovered along the way. 1. I thought having my scripts as internal scripts sounded good for a week until I realized there are all kinds of undocumented problems with storing your scripts that way. I had to refactor. 2. There is no selection outline around mesh in the editor window. Makes it impossible to build a 3D scene in Godot. My guess is that the developers expect you to build the scene in Blender then import it as one big FBX. (But that's not ideal for some things) 3. Then I hit the dangling reference bug and that was a heavy blow to my enthusiasm. The fact you can save a reference to an object in a variable, and that the engine can then change what object your variable is pointing to under the hood. It's such a fundamental bug it makes me wonder what other massive issues are there waiting for me to run into. My work around was to listen for signals for when object references were removed from the scene and manually clearing them, but its a real drag. There were a few other things, but those ones stand out in my memory as examples of why I don't think I can work in it yet. The reference bug won't be fixed until 4.0, so have another look at Godot then. Update: Here are the bugs I logged. https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/31758 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/31758 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/32383 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/32383
turova 6y ago
One thing that I think would hugely shift godot's market share is a standardized asset format, similar to what Unity and Unreal have, so asset developers could offer assets in Godot-compatible format. It would be even more amazing if there was an easy way to import Unity resources. Maybe I just needed to do more research, but last time I tried, I had to pull out individual files, mess around with them in Blender, then import the model and the mesh into Godot separately, where I needed to arrange them together afterward. I think if the asset management was as simple as Unity's, Godot would be a no-brainer in many projects, especially smaller ones.
- lux 6y ago
  As long as it doesn't follow Unity's approach (asset bundles). Unity's favourite thing to do is break asset bundle compatibility between versions.
- nightowl_games 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. Godot has asset formats that translate from project to project.
  - turova 6y ago
    I've used both Unity and Godot at a hobby level and what I found was that with Unity, I spent almost all my time playing around with game mechanics. With Godot, I always spent a considerable amount of time importing resources and fiddling with them before being able to do anything useful other than add basic shapes to the screen. I think it's probably a problem of being the underdog with a much smaller asset market, but that's literally the one thing that made Unity worth checking out for me. I've downloaded most releases of Godot to play around with them as they come out though, so I'm really excited about it growing further.
    - nightowl_games 6y ago
      There are some issues with the 3D importing pipeline, GLTF is the best supported file format, but they recently added .fbx support so thats good. I agree that there could be further improvements made there but I've had good luck with .gltf. Additionally, I've had problems with materials or animations importing into Unity as well. Seems like its a big, common problem. Unity imports started getting smoother in recent years because marketplaces and artists started specifically targeting unity.
Thaxll 6y ago
Godot is a bad 3d engine, performance is abysmal.
hnick 6y ago
Yes I downloaded it last week. I got bored doing a Unity tutorial (how to best explain ... what I was doing all felt a bit disconnected from the games I guess?). I dived right into the Godot tutorial "Your first game"[0] and had something basic running really quickly and I understood most of it without any further reading. [0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_by_step/your_first_game.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_...
insulanus 6y ago
Wow. I just downloaded and installed it (on Linux). Hands down the best install experience of any similar tool. * Unzip one binary and run it. * The app auto-detects everything you need, and uses the best version it finds * Its project layout requirements are "open an empty directory" * The example projects install and work! Seriously, the biggest difficulty I had was finding the "run project" button. It took me a little bit of hunting.

antoineMoPa 6y ago

I wonder when firefox will re enable SharedArrayBuffer.

jszymborski 6y ago
Seeing as it's available in Firefox Nightly, it'd imagine it'd be in the next release provided it doesn't present any problems from then and now.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  A feature introduced in e.g. Nightly 78 might stay out of stable until say version 86. That is features make it to stable by becoming stable not because it first landed in a certain nightly and so everything was held up until all features in that nightly became stable. Releases happen on a fixed 4 week calendar cycle instead. Based on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1563480 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1563480 I'd say it's probably a good number of releases away.
  - hoten 6y ago
    Here's some context you didn't ask for, but hope you find it helpful. There's standardization work being done to enable SAB behind a new security context. Mozilla has a good summary: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/SharedArrayBuffer/Planned_changes https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... At the moment, I think only Chromium enables SAB by default for devices that have "Site Isolation" enabled (avoids spectre attacks by using process isolation). That's a browser feature specific to Chromium, and is disable for some low-memory devices, so it's not universal. I'm not familiar with how far along Chromium or Firefox are. If you're interested in using SAB, start reading up on COOP and COEP. Source: I work on web tooling at Chrome.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Which is a pity, Firefox has already landed on "nice to have" on our browser matrix, and these kind of decisions don't help.

t0astbread 6y ago

I'm still amazed how small the Godot editor is (last time I checked it was ~25MB). Just how are they able to pack this much functionality into such little space?

gjkood 6y ago
I guess its all relative. In the late 80s I was impressed by a full Wordstar compatible text editor for Turbo Pascal which only occupied 25K (including the compiler). Times have indeed changed.
- nightowl_games 6y ago
  A lot of the godot size is the images it packs in itself. When I cloned the godot repo, I could understand the architecture just by the file names. I started falling in love with it as the easily understandable file names started streaming down from the cloud. It's truly a public good.
  - gnulinux 6y ago
    > A lot of the godot size is the images it packs in itself. For comparison, emacs's installed size is 76K [1]. [1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/emacs https://packages.debian.org/sid/emacs
    - yepguy 6y ago
      That's the installed size of the metapackage containing no emacs executable, no elisp files, and no documentation. On my system the emacs executable is 39M and the entire installed package is 128M. (Additionally, my Doom Emacs folder takes up another 840M.)
      - gnulinux 6y ago
        Ah so sorry about that. I should have checked.
      - 6y ago

z3t4 6y ago

It's amazing that a native Windows/Mac app can be compiled to run in a web browser. However Web-assembly does not mean better performance. A native browser app would most likely be faster.

nightowl_games 6y ago
What do you mean by native browser app? Like JS + WebGL?
- snazz 6y ago
  I'm guessing that an app written for WebAssembly in the first place would be faster than an app written for the desktop when they're both running in the browser.
- z3t4 6y ago
  JS is usually not the bottleneck in web apps. The bottleneck is most of the time rendering. Rewriting the app in JS would make it faster then the Webassembly version. It's a common misconception that Webassembly is faster then JS. Although theoretically possible, the compiler wouldn't be able to beat a skilled JS developer's hand written JS specific for the web platform. A turtle is faster then a rabbit - in water.
  - andai 6y ago
    Is this true? I was under the impression that webassembly was capable of faster performance than JS, and thinking about learning a compiled languages to make my web applications faster. Would that be a waste of time?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - z3t4 6y ago
      It would not be a waste of time if you learned something. Here's a quick exercise: Write an "hello world" app and compile it to WebAssembly. Then open browser dev tools to inspect the app. You will see that a middle layer is needed to put that "hello world" on the screen. Just like JS, WebAssembly can't talk directly to the hardware and need to use the same browser API's as JS. Besides obfuscating and being able to compile desktop apps to the web platform, one use-case for WebAssembly that might bring an performance improvement is to use it for something you currently use a Web Worker for. For example sending a bit buffer to the worker, have it do some work on it, and send it back. There is however a penalty to sending the data back and forth, although there are work being done that allows shared memory, which will make both JS and Web-assembly faster. JavaScript is compiled to optimized native code. So you will get away with really stupid code - the optimizer will make it fast. But the more you learn, you will be able to write even faster apps. It really doesn't matter what programming language you use, it's more important to have experience and tribal knowledge of the platform you are targeting. A funny thing about performance is that the more you know, the slower your app could become. If you for example use highly sophisticated abstractions, make use of frameworks and preprocessors, together with an orchestra of cloud functions and services with IPC message across oceans - then it will be slow. If you want performance - just keep it simple.

skybrian 6y ago

I'm not a game developer but it seems like syncing with a standard git repo would be ideal. Is that possible with games or do the assets prevent it?

anderspitman 6y ago
Your intuition is correct. git alone isn't going to cut it for the assets.
slezyr 6y ago
git lfs plugin should help with that one. IIRC Godot's editor has some support for creation of git repositories https://git-lfs.github.com/ https://git-lfs.github.com/
gfxgirl 6y ago
Smallish indie projects get by with git and or git lfs. git isn't really designed for binary assets and large games with terabytes of source assets usually don't use git. git's distributed nature is also an issue for non-mergable binary assets. The most common tool version control for bigger teams is perforce. It's significantly faster than git for binary files and it helps manage 2 or more people trying it edit the same binary file. There maybe be other bolt on solutions for that for git that I'm unaware of to help with that.
- lima 6y ago
  SVN is also quite popular, it's okay at dealing with large repos.
r0bbie 6y ago
We use Git with LFS for our games-orientated projects, including some pretty massive projects, and have found it works really well. We previously used SVN for similar projects, and made the switch to Git once LFS made it a feasible choice for projects with lots of large binary assets (games), and honestly never looked back, it's massively improved our workflow.

anderspitman 6y ago

This is awesome. Question: everything I've read[0] about WebDAV indicates tons of compatibility problems between implementations, even those built into operating systems. I wonder what the plan is to deal with that? Also, are there any off-the-shelf WebDAV client libraries for browsers? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10213657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10213657

stakkur 6y ago

I've been waiting for this.

andai 6y ago

I get a black screen and the JS error "Atomics is not defined." Did we overload it?

shortercode 6y ago
Atomics is part of the threading APIs, I'm guessing your browser doesn't support it. Although I feel like you should get a better error message...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- john4532452 6y ago
  That's strange, this project is funded by mozilla and does not run on latest firefox
  - rewq4321 6y ago
    It says in the blog post you need to use Firefox Nightly

oknoorap 6y ago

Godot is truly real competitor to unity in OSS world, good job, I'll waiting this feature until it's not buggy.

msla 6y ago

Is the wait nearly over? BTW, how do they pronounce the name?

maxeonyx 6y ago
"goh-doh" or "goh-doht" The 'o's are pronounced the same.

rawoke083600 6y ago

Honest question.. Is this "just" the way modern gamedev is being done. With these "Editors For Scenes" ? Like the Unity and Unreal Editors ? Not hating just asking last time I "checked in" on gamedev was prob one or two decades ago and had a lot of fun with IrrLicht and Ogre. Does this "editor approach" not get in the way ? Just looking in as an outsider with almost zero gamedev experience.. don't you end up fighting the editor to just get things done ? Again don't flame me I have no idea what I'm talking about :) PS. GoDot looks great :)

gfxgirl 6y ago
Partly it depends on the game but I think both Unity and Unreal, and I assume Godot, expect that the editor is just a framework and you're expected to extend them to whatever special needs your game has.
- SquareWheel 6y ago
  Godot is particularly good at extending the editor. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/misc/running_code_in_the_editor.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/misc/runnin...
oap_bram 6y ago
Hey software engineer/gamedev here. I use Godot daily to make games for small businesses, usually around GPS-based games. What I really found is that the editor based approach of Godot actually doesn't get in the way, but is actually way closer to the DSL of a game designer. Also the way of making nodes/scenes with signals in Godot promotes making systems that are very loosely coupled, so I haven't ran into any big problems with the engine when it comes to maintainability of projects. And when I want to extend the engine with some native features like Android camera feed (which I'm preparing a PR for somewhere in the future), I can just dig into the code, no need to wait for something like Unity support or something. Honestly, whether you're using this for hobby purposes or if you're dabbling in professional gamedev, this engine is worth a try.
ajconway 6y ago

joeberon 6y ago

Kinda strange but Godot kinda feels like a game dev oriented smalltalk to me

gentleman11 6y ago

How is Godots performance these days? I heard they are adding a ton of c# support after a lot of people have struggled with frame rates in gdscript (source: various youtubers who use Godot) I just switched from unity to unreal because of sketchy retroactive licensing changes from unity and the performance in unreal is really making me happy so far

GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
I wrote a large scale fluid sim (like Cities Skylines' water sim) with Godot and Rust. I think the biggest bottle neck is the gdscript honestly. I had a prototype working in GDScript and after I ported it to rust I had like a 20x speed up