8 ms·

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

by msie 6y ago

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.

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

by 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.