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The more serious my Godot projects became, the more I became aware of the limitations. Even something as simple as an outline shader for a 3D object can only be

The more serious my Godot projects became, the more I became aware of the limitations. Even something as simple as an outline shader for a 3D object can only be implemented in a relatively hacky way. Nonetheless, I love using it. I'm a huge fan of Godot and donate to them every year. The fact the entire engine is a 30mb download is truely amazing. The editor is snappy and is a breath of fresh air in the world of bloated electron apps

jordo 6y ago
This. Same sentiment here. Although one of the greatest strengths in the engine is the fact that it's open source, and extremely easy to build. Any limitation I've come across I've been able to modify or extend with relative ease.
jordo 6y ago
https://bgolus.medium.com/the-quest-for-very-wide-outlines-ba82ed442cd9 https://bgolus.medium.com/the-quest-for-very-wide-outlines-b... FTW
- chairmanwow1 6y ago
  This was a shockingly good read. Thank you very much :)
Qwertious 6y ago
The more serious my Godot projects became, the more I became aware of the limitations. How fundamental would you say the limitations are? Is it just a matter of progress? and maturity?
- dkersten 6y ago
  I gave up on Godot three years ago because I couldn't do something very simple: set the origin correctly on 2D sprites so that they correctly show above things behind them. There is a setting for it (mentioned in the docs, at them time, for the exact thing I wanted) and it did indeed fix it, but it also made my sprite be drawn offset from where the editor showed it, which was immensely annoying. I hit a few annoyances like that. But! Godot has not been standing still and is constantly improving. I haven't had a chance to try it out again since, but I wouldn't be surprised if the issue I hit have been fixed. Its just important to note that it doesn't have the same manpower behind it that Unreal or Unity have and to temper your expectations accordingly. It is a great engine, though, and getting better all the time. I'm also still very proud of the fact that there's a tiny bit of code I contributed in godot-cpp :)
- tpxl 6y ago
  I gave up and am waiting for 4.0 release when I couldn't reasonably implement foreground transparency around the mouse.
- babaganoosh89 6y ago
  I found a lot of annoying GUI bugs for Mac, last I tried ~1 year ago. Seems like most of the developers use Linux.
- gggtt 6y ago
  Maybe it's biased from my personal experience but I feel people overestimate the importance of the engine features for big games. When you do big games, you often write everything yourself My friend works at a studio who's doing an open world game in Unity and they did : their own terrain system (with their custom tessellation, collision system, etc.), their own LOD system, their own pathfinding algo, their own crowd sim, their own multiplayer sync, etc. Similarly, this person : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs1njLLfUBCTAfSZ3Q7gq2Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs1njLLfUBCTAfSZ3Q7gq2Q Did not had to wait for Godot (pun intended) 4.0 to make a very cool terrain, particle and water system. The part that does really matter is the core rendering engine, and this should improve drastically in Godot 4.0
gabereiser 6y ago
I completely agree. The limitations though are something you’ll hit in Unity or Unreal as well, just at a different spot. Each engine has limitations to what they provide. It’s up to you to extend. Godot being open source you can easily extend. Unity/Unreal you’ll be writing some code as scripts to attach to overcome those limitations you encounter. No game engine is limitless.
- Sephr 6y ago
  Unreal engine has shared source and accepts PRs, so you could potentially edit the source code to fix issues as well.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    very true. If your fix is something that would be useful to others, PR away!
  - adrusi 6y ago
    Hopefully they give you a discount on the royalties if you improve their engine for them!
- Agentlien 6y ago
  Every engine I've used has some really good stuff and some surprising limitations. For Frostbite... If you've worked with it you know. Probably my least favourite. In UE4 I love the environment but can't get over how cumbersome some aspects of graphics programming are. Especially how difficult it is to work with compute shaders. For Unity I really like how smooth the workflow is, especially for shader programming. Having used it for a little more than a year now I'm really surprised how nice it is to work with. I barely even mind it being primarily C#.
boterock 6y ago
From what I've seen on computer graphics, most of the algorithms are tricks and hacks... I think that in the end a good engine should acknowledge that it is hard to support everything, so just having a hackable interface is good enough.
moron4hire 6y ago
> Even something as simple as an outline shader for a 3D object can only be implemented in a relatively hacky way. Have you tried to do it in Unity? It's also pretty hacky there.
Agentlien 6y ago
I'm a graphics programmer who's been happily surprised by how easy shaders are to write in Unity. Could you elaborate a bit on the problem with writing such simple effects in Godot?
- chairmanwow1 6y ago
  Firstly, the Visual Shader GUI in Godot has pretty series issues on my Macbook. Secondly, it's impossible to do any effects with a stencil shader [1]. Most of the useful post-processing effects (bloom, depth-of-field etc) are implemented out of the box, so this also means that there isn't a way (AFAIK) to implement post-processing effects yourself. Godot also only has simplex noise implemented out of the box, so you need to jump through some hoops to get anything else included (which is super useful in shaders). [1] also has some images of the way to implement outline shaders in Godot, which is to move the faces of object out by a scaling factor and then render them as unshaded, which leaves some gnarly artifacts at the corners. [1] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/23721 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/23721

jordo 6y ago

This. Same sentiment here. Although one of the greatest strengths in the engine is the fact that it's open source, and extremely easy to build. Any limitation I've come across I've been able to modify or extend with relative ease.

jordo 6y ago

https://bgolus.medium.com/the-quest-for-very-wide-outlines-ba82ed442cd9 https://bgolus.medium.com/the-quest-for-very-wide-outlines-b... FTW

chairmanwow1 6y ago
This was a shockingly good read. Thank you very much :)

Qwertious 6y ago

The more serious my Godot projects became, the more I became aware of the limitations. How fundamental would you say the limitations are? Is it just a matter of progress? and maturity?

dkersten 6y ago
I gave up on Godot three years ago because I couldn't do something very simple: set the origin correctly on 2D sprites so that they correctly show above things behind them. There is a setting for it (mentioned in the docs, at them time, for the exact thing I wanted) and it did indeed fix it, but it also made my sprite be drawn offset from where the editor showed it, which was immensely annoying. I hit a few annoyances like that. But! Godot has not been standing still and is constantly improving. I haven't had a chance to try it out again since, but I wouldn't be surprised if the issue I hit have been fixed. Its just important to note that it doesn't have the same manpower behind it that Unreal or Unity have and to temper your expectations accordingly. It is a great engine, though, and getting better all the time. I'm also still very proud of the fact that there's a tiny bit of code I contributed in godot-cpp :)
tpxl 6y ago
I gave up and am waiting for 4.0 release when I couldn't reasonably implement foreground transparency around the mouse.
babaganoosh89 6y ago
I found a lot of annoying GUI bugs for Mac, last I tried ~1 year ago. Seems like most of the developers use Linux.
gggtt 6y ago
Maybe it's biased from my personal experience but I feel people overestimate the importance of the engine features for big games. When you do big games, you often write everything yourself My friend works at a studio who's doing an open world game in Unity and they did : their own terrain system (with their custom tessellation, collision system, etc.), their own LOD system, their own pathfinding algo, their own crowd sim, their own multiplayer sync, etc. Similarly, this person : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs1njLLfUBCTAfSZ3Q7gq2Q https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs1njLLfUBCTAfSZ3Q7gq2Q Did not had to wait for Godot (pun intended) 4.0 to make a very cool terrain, particle and water system. The part that does really matter is the core rendering engine, and this should improve drastically in Godot 4.0

gabereiser 6y ago

I completely agree. The limitations though are something you’ll hit in Unity or Unreal as well, just at a different spot. Each engine has limitations to what they provide. It’s up to you to extend. Godot being open source you can easily extend. Unity/Unreal you’ll be writing some code as scripts to attach to overcome those limitations you encounter. No game engine is limitless.

Sephr 6y ago
Unreal engine has shared source and accepts PRs, so you could potentially edit the source code to fix issues as well.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  very true. If your fix is something that would be useful to others, PR away!
- adrusi 6y ago
  Hopefully they give you a discount on the royalties if you improve their engine for them!
Agentlien 6y ago
Every engine I've used has some really good stuff and some surprising limitations. For Frostbite... If you've worked with it you know. Probably my least favourite. In UE4 I love the environment but can't get over how cumbersome some aspects of graphics programming are. Especially how difficult it is to work with compute shaders. For Unity I really like how smooth the workflow is, especially for shader programming. Having used it for a little more than a year now I'm really surprised how nice it is to work with. I barely even mind it being primarily C#.

boterock 6y ago

From what I've seen on computer graphics, most of the algorithms are tricks and hacks... I think that in the end a good engine should acknowledge that it is hard to support everything, so just having a hackable interface is good enough.

moron4hire 6y ago

> Even something as simple as an outline shader for a 3D object can only be implemented in a relatively hacky way. Have you tried to do it in Unity? It's also pretty hacky there.

Agentlien 6y ago

I'm a graphics programmer who's been happily surprised by how easy shaders are to write in Unity. Could you elaborate a bit on the problem with writing such simple effects in Godot?

chairmanwow1 6y ago
Firstly, the Visual Shader GUI in Godot has pretty series issues on my Macbook. Secondly, it's impossible to do any effects with a stencil shader [1]. Most of the useful post-processing effects (bloom, depth-of-field etc) are implemented out of the box, so this also means that there isn't a way (AFAIK) to implement post-processing effects yourself. Godot also only has simplex noise implemented out of the box, so you need to jump through some hoops to get anything else included (which is super useful in shaders). [1] also has some images of the way to implement outline shaders in Godot, which is to move the faces of object out by a scaling factor and then render them as unshaded, which leaves some gnarly artifacts at the corners. [1] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/23721 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/23721