8 ms·

Free and open source 2D and 3D game engine

231 points by modinfo 5y ago

wormer 5y ago
Seems cool, but I never learned it because from what I've read it was always overshadowed by Unity. Is this the case anymore?
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Probably. I never learned unity either, when I was younger I used to build games in C with allegro and the transition to gui based development always just seemed so much harder to learn (or at least harder for me to get interested in, with allegro it was all code and I could iterate from drawing a window, adding a square, move around with keys, etc.)
- TuringTest 5y ago
  The upcoming version Godot 4.0 is on par with Unity, with several 2D and 3D subsystems (physics engine, lighting, 2d grid...) being rebuilt in full. It's getting traction in terms of tutorials and courses [1], and several publishers paying attention (e.g. Valve making sure that the Steam Deck will be supported). [1] For example https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gdquest/learn-to-code-from-zero-with-godot-the-free-game-engine https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gdquest/learn-to-code-f..., an already financed Kickstarter to build an open source course and companion app.
- lewispollard 5y ago
  Unity has many more features, a much wider community to look for answers to issues you come across, supports consoles out of the box, and has an enormous asset store which can save time. That said, I prefer Godot. Firstly because it's free and open source. That's a big deal to me, though I get it's not a priority for most people. I've contributed to the Godot source, and frequently compile my own custom builds with new C++ modules or experimental edits to the code (which is relatively straightforward, even for someone like me who hasn't touched C++ in about 15 years). It's also a lot quicker and more self contained than Unity, which takes forever to open a project, forever to compile your scripts. Godot is lightning quick by comparison, even when using C#. Unity has more mature and polished features, but it also has a lot of redundancy, for every feature you have 2 or 3 options of "legacy" or "experimental" versions of that feature, and it's often unclear which is the best choice, having to navigate through a huge list of packages, and googling for blog posts and documentation about things but being unsure which "version" of a feature is being referring to. The asset store in Unity might be huge, but not all of it is high quality, and often expensive. You might pay a chunk (not huge, but not pocket change) for some system or framework that looks ideal on the marketing page, only to find that whoever wrote the scripts weren't really thinking about flexibility for your use case, and wastes time that you were supposed to be saving by paying for it. Godot's asset library is much smaller and mostly confined to scripts and tools, rather than models and textures, though there is some of that. Godot has the same issues any MIT, volunteer-led open source project has: incomplete features with weird UX, features that get bumped back months or years because the dev who was working on it in their free time no longer has that free time, lack of real b2b level support for a commercial project. But for me as a solo, indie game dev, it's kind of freeing to be a part of that and to get involved in the community and the engine internals in a way that Unity gives you no access to. Ok, I can't ring up a case manager for my account and get an answer about this or that Godot feature, I can go on Discord or Github and maybe get an answer if the right person is looking, but more importantly I can just go straight into the source code and understand it for myself, and even tweak and fix it in a way that is truly free. I've also found that once you get used to some of the UI/UX jank in Godot, the design philosophy of how things are structured conceptually is insanely productive. Unity is a hot mess of menus and panes, loading bars and modals, prefabs and components. Godot just gets out of your way - in part because it has fewer features, but I've yet to find something I wanted to do where I couldn't do it - just sometimes it takes a bit of creativity with the tools and API.
  - blensor 5y ago
    In terms of features, for me it feels like a lot of core features in Godot are assets that you have to add to Unity. My best example are Tweens. I would expect this to be a very core feature of a game engine and yet in Unity you have to rely on something like dotween. Also the Animation system in Godot is super awesome. If you are coming from Blender it's basically no learning curve at all. Again a feature that I would exepect to be a core of a game engine.
    - lewispollard 5y ago
      Oh yeah, AnimationPlayer/AnimationTree is definitely a killer feature for Godot, though the UX can be a bit clunky. The ability to call arbitrary functions on things in the scene tree on an animation track is just, chefs kiss
- blensor 5y ago
  We are building a VR fitness game [1] with Godot and are working towards a store release in the Meta store. Also Meta is funding part of the VR development of the Engine. The problem is that Unity is so prevalent at the moment that it's hard to convince people to work with you if you are not using it, but traction of Godot is growing and the things that are coming will make it even more attractive for developers to break out of the Unity monopoly. [1] https://xrworkout.io https://xrworkout.io
KronisLV 5y ago
Here are some thoughts in regards to Godot vs Unity vs jMonkeyEngine (another project i like). Godot: - completely free and open source, it actually seems viable long term because it has a pretty active community and lots of contributors, which is honestly pretty important - the best aspect in my eyes is the fact that it can be installed as a single binary and runs really quickly, none of the bloat of needing complex installers and dozens of packages like Unity does - the language choice is also pretty interesting, their GDScript language being a bit like Python and being integrated pretty well with the engine, as well as other builds support C# and thus switching from Unity is easier (and C# is just a really nice language); there are community bindings or the ability to use C++, but i find those to be less viable, given the lack of ease of use and documentation - that said, in most cases i'd opt for C#, not just because of its performance being better, but GDScript lacking certain functionality to be able to use design patterns, for example singletons or service patterns or anything else that attempts to centralize bits of game logic into manager classes versus having everything be some distributed mess of interdependent game objects/scripts - the tools and functionality that is included is pretty good, however there are some things that are lacking, like a terrain system or dynamic render resolution, though thankfully there are community plugins which address the most severe of these shortcomings - that said, there is not even 1% of the assets that you'd get in other game engines like Unity or packages, because Godot hasn't really figured out the financial incentives and having a marketplace yet - it's great that you can get a variety of free assets, but as a content creator you might not want to expect Godot to be a viable financial venture yet - currently version 4 is in development, which adds Vulkan support and numerous other quality of life improvements (like automatic LODs), however 3 is also actively supported and functionality is occasionally backported - also, the asset formats and other imported files (apart from binary data) can be easily versioned with regular Git installs, maybe with LFS for assets if you want - overall, it's a pretty nice project and one of the few ones that i'd call "production ready" Suggestion of some Godot videos - GDQuest channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Gdquest/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Gdquest/videos (they have a site as well: https://www.gdquest.com/ https://www.gdquest.com/) Unity: - wins in regards to job positions available, hands down - the support for C# is top notch, IDEs also have nice plugins, e.g. JetBrains Rider tells me which methods are likely to be slow and gives me other hints which is really great - the documentation is pretty good, there is an absolutely staggering amount of quality tutorials and even written guides out there as well - the amount of both free and paid assets is absolutely amazing, you can solve most programmatic and other problems quickly (need splines? pathing solutions? dynamic LOD? billboarding for objects far away? or maybe models? what about shaders? all of those and more are covered) - personally, i also think that the GameObject system with components is really nice - you can attach numerous different behaviors to any object that you want (composition) vs needing to either work with inheritance in Godot by extending scripts or having child nodes affect the behavior of parent nodes (which feels odd, maybe i'm just used to how Unity works) - the performance for exported games is really good, all of the built in rendering solutions are performant and have been tested really widely in the industry - speaking of tested, it's also been used for a really wide variety of platforms and has support for lots of input devices etc. - all of that said, it feels like the engine has made a steep nose dive in the last 5 years, DOTS (their new ECS) is being implemented gradually and oftentimes still isn't as stable as it could be - the build in rendering solutions are problematic (built in render pipeline, Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)), since many of the assets clash, projects need to be converted if you ever switch, external assets might not be compatible, shaders break etc.; a demo scene from 2019 had most materials be pink and became invisible after reimport - the editor has gotten way worse performance wise, a scene with about 1000 assets takes a minute to load and display (wanted a scene with every asset i have displayed side by side for scale comparison), editing scripts and switching to editor lags noticeably, moving stuff around is slow, just horrible performance on a vaguely modern hardware setup - the situation of the engine and its parts is an utter mess altogether: they have multiple UI solutions, multiple input solutions, no workable multiplayer solutions (they deprecated what they had, replacements are not ready yet) - because of all of the above i've since moved from Unity to Godot, the engine feels like some mess of trying to add new flashy features without properly testing them before release while at the same time having most of the legacy stuff stick around except for when they pull the rug out from under your feet and break something - also, its integration with Git isn't too good Suggestion of some Unity videos - Sebastian Lague: https://www.youtube.com/c/SebastianLague/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/SebastianLague/videos (more about getting things done with the engine) jMonkeyEngine: - just suggesting this because i like the project but it's also an example of what not to do - being able to write games in Java is actually a pretty good idea and works decently in practice, regardless of what others say - being able to export a cross platform .jar file and run it almost anywhere with a JDK/JRE is also really nice in regards to portability - the engine being free and having vaguely passable docs and some extensions (similarly lacking like Godot's though) is also okay - it does fail in regards to UI/UX, though, since not having a user friendly visual editor is one of the larger mistakes that you can make - also, while code-heavy engines definitely have their place, some of the integrated solutions, e.g. the UI ones are a bit of a mess and the docs were incomplete last i checked - the graphics capabilities are also a bit limited and it seems that the engine never really got off the ground that well - that said, i wish the engine would become more popular and would find its niche with passionate supporters, though thankfully it's at least more stable than both Godot and Unity are, so there's that Link to their OpenCollective, to illustrate my point of why you might need a following: https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine (contrast that to Godot's budget, which is shown on their site) In summary, i think that Godot has gained the critical following that it needs to be viable for game development and other pursuits (e.g. tool creation) long term. Unity will keep to being in slow decline until they'll hopefully get their stuff together down the road yet will also be a dependable workhorse for the industry in a professional capacity. I guess you could also mention Unreal in this niche, albeit it's a tad different (better suited for a particular type of game, a bit harder to code in but also capable of really good graphics). jMonkey engines and other projects like it (e.g. Xenko/Stride) will pop up occasionally but without Godot's following they might survive at best while having one or two nice innovations or features that set them apart and make them decent for some use cases. Overall, one has to admire that they can get started with game development at almost no expense, since lots of other tools like Blender and GIMP are also free!
gundamdoubleO 5y ago
I really like Godot and I've been working on a small 3D game project using it. I'm not biased towards any game engine but whenever I attempted to learn Unity I'd find something that put me off which demotivated me. The UI, for example, is a huge turn off, I think it's straight up ugly and a poor user experience. The engine also doesn't get the best support on Linux (at least it didn't when I tried it last). So while I find Godot a little more constrained than Unity I much prefer it. The UI is better (although I wouldn't call it perfect by any means) and it's very easy to work with on a small project with it. Once I got familiar with the key concepts of the engine like Scenes I didn't find myself reaching for documentation or tutorials as much compared to Unity. That said, the community for Unity is massive in comparison. If you have a very specific problem or want to implement something niche into your game you'll find a Unity example for it much more often than in Godot.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  I didn't mind the result when I would actually build things but getting to that result in Godot was utterly obtuse.
- TruthWillHurt 5y ago
  I find the Unity UI very convenient and simple (compared to Unreal), and I develop on Linux, for Linux without a hitch.
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    > (compared to Unreal) Well, I don't think a lot of people is going to dispute that ;]
  - plafl 5y ago
    What is your setup? Because I'm using Fedora and installed Unity because I was curious and deleted it after having problems (I don't remember the error though).
    - TruthWillHurt 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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- apollodorus 5y ago
  Learning game engines is a rather broad subject. Godot is as good a starting point as any. They have good tutorials on the website and you can find tutorials for pretty much any type of game on youtube.
ArtWomb 5y ago
Looks like the new demo to be revealed at GDC 2022 Mar 21-25 ;) GDC is back this year. I was checking out the sessions, and it's pretty much everything state of the art: google on language model games, ms flight sim terrain proc gen, cyberpunk 2077 lighting night city, space station 13, and the diablo 2 resurrection!
bodge5000 5y ago
Still very much looking forward to Godot 4, and unless I find a framework I really like will probably stick with it, but I've been a bit down on Godot recently (been using it for just over 2 years now I think), largely in its handling of custom resources and the fact that they aren't really first class citizens and have some odd limitations. That and Godots limitations with 3D, though at least I was well aware of them beforehand. Though if you're new to Godot or haven't used it, I'd still highly recommend it as a game engine. I tried going back to Unity a few months ago and didn't last a week (despite the fact I prefer c# to GDscript). As for Unreal, if you're an artist its probably great, but as a programmer the several times I've tried it, it didn't feel like its for me.
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  You've used c# in Godot, yes? It has full support now and a (slight) performance boost over GDScript.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    I have in the past but didn't find it supported as well as GDScript. Maybe things are better now. Also there was something about Mono needing to be installed on the end users machine which didnt sound ideal, but probably worth looking into again
    - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
      Mono does still need to be installed, which may be a deal breaker. That hasn't changed =/
sylware 5y ago
I wish it was written in simple C89 with benign bits of c99/c11 (high level languages would call the engine API using their ABI generic interface, for instance ctype with python). That said, builds of game binaries is challenging for linux based OSes to maximize compatibility among distros and in time (pure ELF64, all distributed binaries are "libdl-ized", pthread TLS and not ELF symbol tls, etc). It is probably very similar to what must be done on other OSes.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  > I wish it was written in simple C89 with benign bits of c99/c11 Seems like an awful lot of work for no real gain.
flutas 5y ago
Fun fact: Godot is used by Tesla for their car visualization (including autopilot) in both the mobile apps and the in-car displays.
- Nathanael_M 5y ago
  This really is a fun fact, haha! I love hearing practical use cases for game engines.
  - nrjames 5y ago
    The Godot editor itself is made with Godot, which is cool. Everything you see in the UI there is available for use in your own projects.
    - Nathanael_M 5y ago
      Another fun fact, wow. That makes expanding its capabilities much more accessible I suppose. If someone goes to the trouble of adding some new functionality, they can use that same knowledge/stack to add a handy UI to the functionality so it's more usable by everyone.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  Does Tesla contribute everything back? I see that Godot is MIT license, which unfortunately means that while it's great to see major companies using it, they're not legally compelled to upstream any changes they might be making in the engine for their uses.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    Does it need to? Also what would Tesla contribute back, considering they're not actually in the gaming business?
    - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
      No, it doesn't need to, that's part of my lament about using a permissive MIT license rather than a GPL one. > Also what would Tesla contribute back, considering they're not actually in the gaming business? If they use Godot completely out-of-the-box with no customization, then nothing. But the parent commented noted that they use it for their car visualization. If they made an internal fork to add in some performance tweaks, that would be the kind of thing that would benefit the community as a whole if it's upstreamed. And maybe Godot decides those changes actually aren't useful to anyone else and disregards them. But they might be, and that's the key.
VyseofArcadia 5y ago
Currently working in Godot for the first time for this year's 7DRL [1]. Compared to previous years in which we rolled our own everything in PureScript, it's crazy productive and a mostly pleasant experience. First class Linux support is magical. My teammate and I are developing cross-platform on Linux and Mac, and I have had zero problems on PopOS. (My teammate on Mac, however, has had to restart the Godot editor a bunch, as it does not seem to play as nicely with Git on that platform.) My complaints would be that gdscript can be unintuitive and just plain janky. There's a lot of wrestling with internode communications. Signals are super clunky to use. We've been using this ad hoc mish mash of signals, inheritance, and preloads (think #include). I wouldn't take our approach for any real project, but it's good enough for a hackathon. [1] 7 Day Roguelike https://7drl.com/ https://7drl.com/
- kbelder 5y ago
  Right, it's signals and the whole communication process between nodes that's the issue, and the only thing in Godot that causes me to pull my hair out. So much in Godot falls magically into place when you try, and then you have to send a piece of info from one object to another, and the official standard methods to do so look like an outrageous clunky hack.
mkw2000 5y ago
When I was trying to dabble in game development, by far the hardest part of getting started for me was deciding on an engine to use. Godot was one of the top contenders for sure
SXX 5y ago
Shameless plug. If someone interested in seeing actual commercial game using Godot you can check out the demo and add Dwarven Skykeep to wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/ It's pixel art chaos management game with extremely complex gameplay. We're several years in development by small team of 10. Even funded by a publisher now.
terrycody 5y ago
I am only worried about one thing, that is, if I now learn Godot, then one day, Unity or Unreal open sourced their engines, will this be destructive for us?

231 points by modinfo 5y ago

Seems cool, but I never learned it because from what I've read it was always overshadowed by Unity. Is this the case anymore?

edgyquant 5y ago
Probably. I never learned unity either, when I was younger I used to build games in C with allegro and the transition to gui based development always just seemed so much harder to learn (or at least harder for me to get interested in, with allegro it was all code and I could iterate from drawing a window, adding a square, move around with keys, etc.)
TuringTest 5y ago
The upcoming version Godot 4.0 is on par with Unity, with several 2D and 3D subsystems (physics engine, lighting, 2d grid...) being rebuilt in full. It's getting traction in terms of tutorials and courses [1], and several publishers paying attention (e.g. Valve making sure that the Steam Deck will be supported). [1] For example https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gdquest/learn-to-code-from-zero-with-godot-the-free-game-engine https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gdquest/learn-to-code-f..., an already financed Kickstarter to build an open source course and companion app.
lewispollard 5y ago
Unity has many more features, a much wider community to look for answers to issues you come across, supports consoles out of the box, and has an enormous asset store which can save time. That said, I prefer Godot. Firstly because it's free and open source. That's a big deal to me, though I get it's not a priority for most people. I've contributed to the Godot source, and frequently compile my own custom builds with new C++ modules or experimental edits to the code (which is relatively straightforward, even for someone like me who hasn't touched C++ in about 15 years). It's also a lot quicker and more self contained than Unity, which takes forever to open a project, forever to compile your scripts. Godot is lightning quick by comparison, even when using C#. Unity has more mature and polished features, but it also has a lot of redundancy, for every feature you have 2 or 3 options of "legacy" or "experimental" versions of that feature, and it's often unclear which is the best choice, having to navigate through a huge list of packages, and googling for blog posts and documentation about things but being unsure which "version" of a feature is being referring to. The asset store in Unity might be huge, but not all of it is high quality, and often expensive. You might pay a chunk (not huge, but not pocket change) for some system or framework that looks ideal on the marketing page, only to find that whoever wrote the scripts weren't really thinking about flexibility for your use case, and wastes time that you were supposed to be saving by paying for it. Godot's asset library is much smaller and mostly confined to scripts and tools, rather than models and textures, though there is some of that. Godot has the same issues any MIT, volunteer-led open source project has: incomplete features with weird UX, features that get bumped back months or years because the dev who was working on it in their free time no longer has that free time, lack of real b2b level support for a commercial project. But for me as a solo, indie game dev, it's kind of freeing to be a part of that and to get involved in the community and the engine internals in a way that Unity gives you no access to. Ok, I can't ring up a case manager for my account and get an answer about this or that Godot feature, I can go on Discord or Github and maybe get an answer if the right person is looking, but more importantly I can just go straight into the source code and understand it for myself, and even tweak and fix it in a way that is truly free. I've also found that once you get used to some of the UI/UX jank in Godot, the design philosophy of how things are structured conceptually is insanely productive. Unity is a hot mess of menus and panes, loading bars and modals, prefabs and components. Godot just gets out of your way - in part because it has fewer features, but I've yet to find something I wanted to do where I couldn't do it - just sometimes it takes a bit of creativity with the tools and API.
- blensor 5y ago
  In terms of features, for me it feels like a lot of core features in Godot are assets that you have to add to Unity. My best example are Tweens. I would expect this to be a very core feature of a game engine and yet in Unity you have to rely on something like dotween. Also the Animation system in Godot is super awesome. If you are coming from Blender it's basically no learning curve at all. Again a feature that I would exepect to be a core of a game engine.
  - lewispollard 5y ago
    Oh yeah, AnimationPlayer/AnimationTree is definitely a killer feature for Godot, though the UX can be a bit clunky. The ability to call arbitrary functions on things in the scene tree on an animation track is just, chefs kiss
blensor 5y ago
We are building a VR fitness game [1] with Godot and are working towards a store release in the Meta store. Also Meta is funding part of the VR development of the Engine. The problem is that Unity is so prevalent at the moment that it's hard to convince people to work with you if you are not using it, but traction of Godot is growing and the things that are coming will make it even more attractive for developers to break out of the Unity monopoly. [1] https://xrworkout.io https://xrworkout.io

KronisLV 5y ago

Here are some thoughts in regards to Godot vs Unity vs jMonkeyEngine (another project i like). Godot: - completely free and open source, it actually seems viable long term because it has a pretty active community and lots of contributors, which is honestly pretty important - the best aspect in my eyes is the fact that it can be installed as a single binary and runs really quickly, none of the bloat of needing complex installers and dozens of packages like Unity does - the language choice is also pretty interesting, their GDScript language being a bit like Python and being integrated pretty well with the engine, as well as other builds support C# and thus switching from Unity is easier (and C# is just a really nice language); there are community bindings or the ability to use C++, but i find those to be less viable, given the lack of ease of use and documentation - that said, in most cases i'd opt for C#, not just because of its performance being better, but GDScript lacking certain functionality to be able to use design patterns, for example singletons or service patterns or anything else that attempts to centralize bits of game logic into manager classes versus having everything be some distributed mess of interdependent game objects/scripts - the tools and functionality that is included is pretty good, however there are some things that are lacking, like a terrain system or dynamic render resolution, though thankfully there are community plugins which address the most severe of these shortcomings - that said, there is not even 1% of the assets that you'd get in other game engines like Unity or packages, because Godot hasn't really figured out the financial incentives and having a marketplace yet - it's great that you can get a variety of free assets, but as a content creator you might not want to expect Godot to be a viable financial venture yet - currently version 4 is in development, which adds Vulkan support and numerous other quality of life improvements (like automatic LODs), however 3 is also actively supported and functionality is occasionally backported - also, the asset formats and other imported files (apart from binary data) can be easily versioned with regular Git installs, maybe with LFS for assets if you want - overall, it's a pretty nice project and one of the few ones that i'd call "production ready" Suggestion of some Godot videos - GDQuest channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Gdquest/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Gdquest/videos (they have a site as well: https://www.gdquest.com/ https://www.gdquest.com/) Unity: - wins in regards to job positions available, hands down - the support for C# is top notch, IDEs also have nice plugins, e.g. JetBrains Rider tells me which methods are likely to be slow and gives me other hints which is really great - the documentation is pretty good, there is an absolutely staggering amount of quality tutorials and even written guides out there as well - the amount of both free and paid assets is absolutely amazing, you can solve most programmatic and other problems quickly (need splines? pathing solutions? dynamic LOD? billboarding for objects far away? or maybe models? what about shaders? all of those and more are covered) - personally, i also think that the GameObject system with components is really nice - you can attach numerous different behaviors to any object that you want (composition) vs needing to either work with inheritance in Godot by extending scripts or having child nodes affect the behavior of parent nodes (which feels odd, maybe i'm just used to how Unity works) - the performance for exported games is really good, all of the built in rendering solutions are performant and have been tested really widely in the industry - speaking of tested, it's also been used for a really wide variety of platforms and has support for lots of input devices etc. - all of that said, it feels like the engine has made a steep nose dive in the last 5 years, DOTS (their new ECS) is being implemented gradually and oftentimes still isn't as stable as it could be - the build in rendering solutions are problematic (built in render pipeline, Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)), since many of the assets clash, projects need to be converted if you ever switch, external assets might not be compatible, shaders break etc.; a demo scene from 2019 had most materials be pink and became invisible after reimport - the editor has gotten way worse performance wise, a scene with about 1000 assets takes a minute to load and display (wanted a scene with every asset i have displayed side by side for scale comparison), editing scripts and switching to editor lags noticeably, moving stuff around is slow, just horrible performance on a vaguely modern hardware setup - the situation of the engine and its parts is an utter mess altogether: they have multiple UI solutions, multiple input solutions, no workable multiplayer solutions (they deprecated what they had, replacements are not ready yet) - because of all of the above i've since moved from Unity to Godot, the engine feels like some mess of trying to add new flashy features without properly testing them before release while at the same time having most of the legacy stuff stick around except for when they pull the rug out from under your feet and break something - also, its integration with Git isn't too good Suggestion of some Unity videos - Sebastian Lague: https://www.youtube.com/c/SebastianLague/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/SebastianLague/videos (more about getting things done with the engine) jMonkeyEngine: - just suggesting this because i like the project but it's also an example of what not to do - being able to write games in Java is actually a pretty good idea and works decently in practice, regardless of what others say - being able to export a cross platform .jar file and run it almost anywhere with a JDK/JRE is also really nice in regards to portability - the engine being free and having vaguely passable docs and some extensions (similarly lacking like Godot's though) is also okay - it does fail in regards to UI/UX, though, since not having a user friendly visual editor is one of the larger mistakes that you can make - also, while code-heavy engines definitely have their place, some of the integrated solutions, e.g. the UI ones are a bit of a mess and the docs were incomplete last i checked - the graphics capabilities are also a bit limited and it seems that the engine never really got off the ground that well - that said, i wish the engine would become more popular and would find its niche with passionate supporters, though thankfully it's at least more stable than both Godot and Unity are, so there's that Link to their OpenCollective, to illustrate my point of why you might need a following: https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine (contrast that to Godot's budget, which is shown on their site) In summary, i think that Godot has gained the critical following that it needs to be viable for game development and other pursuits (e.g. tool creation) long term. Unity will keep to being in slow decline until they'll hopefully get their stuff together down the road yet will also be a dependable workhorse for the industry in a professional capacity. I guess you could also mention Unreal in this niche, albeit it's a tad different (better suited for a particular type of game, a bit harder to code in but also capable of really good graphics). jMonkey engines and other projects like it (e.g. Xenko/Stride) will pop up occasionally but without Godot's following they might survive at best while having one or two nice innovations or features that set them apart and make them decent for some use cases. Overall, one has to admire that they can get started with game development at almost no expense, since lots of other tools like Blender and GIMP are also free!

gundamdoubleO 5y ago

I really like Godot and I've been working on a small 3D game project using it. I'm not biased towards any game engine but whenever I attempted to learn Unity I'd find something that put me off which demotivated me. The UI, for example, is a huge turn off, I think it's straight up ugly and a poor user experience. The engine also doesn't get the best support on Linux (at least it didn't when I tried it last). So while I find Godot a little more constrained than Unity I much prefer it. The UI is better (although I wouldn't call it perfect by any means) and it's very easy to work with on a small project with it. Once I got familiar with the key concepts of the engine like Scenes I didn't find myself reaching for documentation or tutorials as much compared to Unity. That said, the community for Unity is massive in comparison. If you have a very specific problem or want to implement something niche into your game you'll find a Unity example for it much more often than in Godot.

mhh__ 5y ago
I didn't mind the result when I would actually build things but getting to that result in Godot was utterly obtuse.
TruthWillHurt 5y ago
I find the Unity UI very convenient and simple (compared to Unreal), and I develop on Linux, for Linux without a hitch.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  > (compared to Unreal) Well, I don't think a lot of people is going to dispute that ;]
- plafl 5y ago
  What is your setup? Because I'm using Fedora and installed Unity because I was curious and deleted it after having problems (I don't remember the error though).
  - TruthWillHurt 5y ago

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apollodorus 5y ago
Learning game engines is a rather broad subject. Godot is as good a starting point as any. They have good tutorials on the website and you can find tutorials for pretty much any type of game on youtube.

ArtWomb 5y ago

Looks like the new demo to be revealed at GDC 2022 Mar 21-25 ;) GDC is back this year. I was checking out the sessions, and it's pretty much everything state of the art: google on language model games, ms flight sim terrain proc gen, cyberpunk 2077 lighting night city, space station 13, and the diablo 2 resurrection!

bodge5000 5y ago

Still very much looking forward to Godot 4, and unless I find a framework I really like will probably stick with it, but I've been a bit down on Godot recently (been using it for just over 2 years now I think), largely in its handling of custom resources and the fact that they aren't really first class citizens and have some odd limitations. That and Godots limitations with 3D, though at least I was well aware of them beforehand. Though if you're new to Godot or haven't used it, I'd still highly recommend it as a game engine. I tried going back to Unity a few months ago and didn't last a week (despite the fact I prefer c# to GDscript). As for Unreal, if you're an artist its probably great, but as a programmer the several times I've tried it, it didn't feel like its for me.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago
You've used c# in Godot, yes? It has full support now and a (slight) performance boost over GDScript.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  I have in the past but didn't find it supported as well as GDScript. Maybe things are better now. Also there was something about Mono needing to be installed on the end users machine which didnt sound ideal, but probably worth looking into again
  - UnpossibleJim 5y ago
    Mono does still need to be installed, which may be a deal breaker. That hasn't changed =/

sylware 5y ago

I wish it was written in simple C89 with benign bits of c99/c11 (high level languages would call the engine API using their ABI generic interface, for instance ctype with python). That said, builds of game binaries is challenging for linux based OSes to maximize compatibility among distros and in time (pure ELF64, all distributed binaries are "libdl-ized", pthread TLS and not ELF symbol tls, etc). It is probably very similar to what must be done on other OSes.

bigbillheck 5y ago
> I wish it was written in simple C89 with benign bits of c99/c11 Seems like an awful lot of work for no real gain.

flutas 5y ago

Fun fact: Godot is used by Tesla for their car visualization (including autopilot) in both the mobile apps and the in-car displays.

Nathanael_M 5y ago
This really is a fun fact, haha! I love hearing practical use cases for game engines.
- nrjames 5y ago
  The Godot editor itself is made with Godot, which is cool. Everything you see in the UI there is available for use in your own projects.
  - Nathanael_M 5y ago
    Another fun fact, wow. That makes expanding its capabilities much more accessible I suppose. If someone goes to the trouble of adding some new functionality, they can use that same knowledge/stack to add a handy UI to the functionality so it's more usable by everyone.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
Does Tesla contribute everything back? I see that Godot is MIT license, which unfortunately means that while it's great to see major companies using it, they're not legally compelled to upstream any changes they might be making in the engine for their uses.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Does it need to? Also what would Tesla contribute back, considering they're not actually in the gaming business?
  - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
    No, it doesn't need to, that's part of my lament about using a permissive MIT license rather than a GPL one. > Also what would Tesla contribute back, considering they're not actually in the gaming business? If they use Godot completely out-of-the-box with no customization, then nothing. But the parent commented noted that they use it for their car visualization. If they made an internal fork to add in some performance tweaks, that would be the kind of thing that would benefit the community as a whole if it's upstreamed. And maybe Godot decides those changes actually aren't useful to anyone else and disregards them. But they might be, and that's the key.

VyseofArcadia 5y ago

Currently working in Godot for the first time for this year's 7DRL [1]. Compared to previous years in which we rolled our own everything in PureScript, it's crazy productive and a mostly pleasant experience. First class Linux support is magical. My teammate and I are developing cross-platform on Linux and Mac, and I have had zero problems on PopOS. (My teammate on Mac, however, has had to restart the Godot editor a bunch, as it does not seem to play as nicely with Git on that platform.) My complaints would be that gdscript can be unintuitive and just plain janky. There's a lot of wrestling with internode communications. Signals are super clunky to use. We've been using this ad hoc mish mash of signals, inheritance, and preloads (think #include). I wouldn't take our approach for any real project, but it's good enough for a hackathon. [1] 7 Day Roguelike https://7drl.com/ https://7drl.com/

kbelder 5y ago
Right, it's signals and the whole communication process between nodes that's the issue, and the only thing in Godot that causes me to pull my hair out. So much in Godot falls magically into place when you try, and then you have to send a piece of info from one object to another, and the official standard methods to do so look like an outrageous clunky hack.

mkw2000 5y ago

When I was trying to dabble in game development, by far the hardest part of getting started for me was deciding on an engine to use. Godot was one of the top contenders for sure

SXX 5y ago

Shameless plug. If someone interested in seeing actual commercial game using Godot you can check out the demo and add Dwarven Skykeep to wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/ It's pixel art chaos management game with extremely complex gameplay. We're several years in development by small team of 10. Even funded by a publisher now.

terrycody 5y ago

I am only worried about one thing, that is, if I now learn Godot, then one day, Unity or Unreal open sourced their engines, will this be destructive for us?