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> This doesn't mean anything at all if you've actually built a game before. You can do this with ENet alone, which means they haven't done anything for you. Th
by crocodiletears 6y ago
> This doesn't mean anything at all if you've actually built a game before. You can do this with ENet alone, which means they haven't done anything for you.
They've integrated it into the engine, tested it across multiple platforms, exposed its methods via the language bindings interface, and abstracted away memory management if you don't want to think about it. They've also written a simple protocol that allows for remote procedure calls on the scene-tree that abstracts away the lower-level networking components. That's not nothing.
> There's effectively no difference in its multiplayer offering and a GitHub project with under 100 stars and a month's development work binding rendering APIs to a popular programming language. You literally have to do everything yourself.
The difference is every other feature of the engine.
> None of this means anything at all. You're just saying people have to create their own work, but hey, since it's in a "module" that makes it good!
I'm saying that the engine allows anyone who wants a feature to add it without requiring low-level development efforts, or getting the devs to accept a feature commit to make it generally available. This doesn't excuse every missing feature in the engine by a long-shot. But it does mean that the engine, and its development team can focus on getting the boring things right, and can reasonably expect their community to fill in the blanks over time.
> Yeah you're right, and the end result is basically no one does multiplayer or does it well, because most people using Godot don't know what they're doing to begin with. It's easy to not get in somebody's way when you do nothing at all, isn't it?
Most people using any game engine don't know what they're doing. And once again, I think you're exaggerating when you say, 'nothing at all'. Minimal? Yes.
> As far as I know, they spent Mozilla funds to continue developing it versus features actual game developers care about.
Per their blog posts, the 2019 Mozilla grant was used to fund the following things game developers don't care about:
1. Godot's Browser support
2. Improving Networking documentation, and debugging features, refactoring their TCP/UDP layer, implementing DTLS over UDP
3. Assets for showcase and benchmarking demos
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-mozilla-open-source-support-program https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-m...
> I don't really see a difference between what it offers in terms of meaningful features, and what someone experienced could throw themselves in 3-6 months time.
At the very least, 3-6 months of development time. Some of which could likely be used to implement a networking protocol.
But more seriously, you get a solid, well-documented, increasingly refined engine with a permissive license that's actively being tested and maintained across multiple platforms and hardware configurations.
The engine has several dedicated developers working full-time that you don't have to pay for, who are often happy to answer any questions you may have, and a large community to provide free support whenever they're unavailable or unwilling to help.
You also have a young but growing plug-in ecosystem whose developers seem to love sharing their source code.
Most of the features that are there are fairly mature, and are actively being battle-tested by novice and dumb developers with a gift for finding edge cases and breaking things.
An experienced developer could certainly approximate Godot's feature set in six months. Of that, I have no doubt. But I really think you're underestimating the team, and what it's achieved.