6 ms·

Godot is really cool, but a clear and publicly delineated path to console distribution (and not "go talk to these guys", as they currently do) is going to be ne

Godot is really cool, but a clear and publicly delineated path to console distribution (and not "go talk to these guys", as they currently do) is going to be necessary to get material interest out of most of the gamedev space.

to-too-two 4y ago
I'd love official console support but it's not possible being open-source. Porting it yourself is an option, but not many will be inclined to do that and would have to opt for paying a third-party to do so.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  Couldn't you just have a bridge library of some sort that's not open source and contains only the console-specific code?
  - to-too-two 4y ago
    From the official Godot docs: The reason other consoles are not officially supported are: - To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot does not have such a legal figure. - Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license. - Consoles require specialized hardware to develop for, so regular individuals can't create games for them anyway. Source: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
    - TulliusCicero 4y ago
      1. This doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm sure there's some legal-fu you could do here to have a 'company' that's the primary contributor to Godot. Wikipedia has a company of some sort, does it not? And Mozilla's a company. 2. So what? Yes, the console-specific stuff has to be kept secret, that sucks, but it's better than not having support for consoles at all. 3. Okay? Godot isn't just being used by "regular individuals", whatever that means, it's being used by people who want to make games and then sell them -- including, yes, companies -- and those people want to be able to publish games to consoles. That last one is just bizarre. Who do they think their userbase is, exactly? "People who want to make games for PC and mobile but have zero interest in any consoles ever"?
      - Aeolun 4y ago
        > People who want to make games for PC and mobile but have zero interest in any consoles ever I don’t understand why you are surprised by this? By your own admission, nobody that wants to develop for consoles would use Godot, so logically, their entire userbase are people that don’t want to do that.
        TulliusCicero 4y ago
        Can't tell if serious or satire. There are absolutely people interested in using Godot as a game engine, including using it to make games for consoles. But many don't, because porting to consoles is painful and expensive, apparently involving third parties as a general rule. Obviously people for whom porting to consoles is a high priority are unlikely to choose Godot right this second, but we're talking about potential users as well, not just the current exact userbase.
        Aeolun 4y ago
        I just don’t think that ‘potential users’ are a really strong consideration for what ultimately amounts to a hobby project (or a project with no corporate backing anyway).
        TulliusCicero 4y ago
        I don't know what your objection is. They make a game engine, they support PC and mobile by default, console is the obvious missing piece of functionality. I can understand why it's lower priority because yeah, it's harder to support, but at least one of the devs works on this full time, and the two core devs have been working on this for several years now. I think it's a bit beyond hobby project, they're clearly trying to compete with Unity, even if it's not a for-profit company. If you read articles like this, it doesn't sound like a small hobby project anymore: https://godotengine.org/article/donation-changes https://godotengine.org/article/donation-changes Granted, it's still small potatoes compared to Unity, no doubt. edit: huh, looks like they have several people full-time, from the article > Godot is developed by more than a thousand contributors, and coordinating this massive community requires a full-time involvement of several of us (and hopefully soon even more full-timers), which your generosity enables. edit2: holy shit Unity had 5000 employees in 2021 according to Wikipedia. I knew they were fairly big but goddamn, didn't think they'd be that big. Man, now I'm also confused at how they can have a successful, popular game engine with a flourishing asset store and yet still be losing money. Just hired too many people?
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Yes. This is the main and only major thing that is holding Godot back from mass indie adoption. I would choose GMS2 or Unity over Godot for a 2D commercial indie project even though GML is worthless on a resume and Unity has all the Unity problems, because they build to all the consoles. Or Defold, since it is really nice and at least can target Switch. And I would choose Unreal or Unity or maybe even Cocos Creator (which recently added Switch support) for a 3D project for the same reason. If you want mass adoption, you need to make it financially viable for commercial indies to use your engine, and good luck convincing those people if they know they need to hire a 3rd party company to port to consoles. Since Godot can't really go the console route, though, they basically need to do the work of figuring out how their users can make enough money on just web, mobile, and/or desktop, and then articulate and successfully sell that solution to them. Steam Deck could help for sure, but it's a big ask
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  > Since Godot can't really go the console route Wait, why not? I thought it was a deliberate choice on the devs' part not to prioritize native support for consoles, not something that's actually impossible (since obviously other third party engines do it).
  - skneko 4y ago
    As explained in [0]: - To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot does not have such a legal figure. - Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license. [0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/blob/master/tutorials/platform/consoles.rst https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/blob/master/tutori...
    - eropple 4y ago
      MonoGame gets around it by having core team members that grant access to private trees for approved developers. It's not open source, but it's available.
remram 4y ago
The consoles make this explicitly incompatible with open source though. That could possibly be a separate entity I suppose, or hopefully if Godot becomes big enough the consoles could arrange something.
- remram 4y ago
  Seems like they might be reading HN, posted yesterday: Godot and consoles, all you need to know https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119337)
Aeolun 4y ago
I don’t think that’s necessary at all, since it’d take away from core Godot development.
Mikeb85 4y ago
Why? It's dependency-free C++. It's easy to port.
juanuys 4y ago
This just published since your comment: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...

to-too-two 4y ago

I'd love official console support but it's not possible being open-source. Porting it yourself is an option, but not many will be inclined to do that and would have to opt for paying a third-party to do so.

TulliusCicero 4y ago
Couldn't you just have a bridge library of some sort that's not open source and contains only the console-specific code?
- to-too-two 4y ago
  From the official Godot docs: The reason other consoles are not officially supported are: - To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot does not have such a legal figure. - Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license. - Consoles require specialized hardware to develop for, so regular individuals can't create games for them anyway. Source: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
  - TulliusCicero 4y ago
    1. This doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm sure there's some legal-fu you could do here to have a 'company' that's the primary contributor to Godot. Wikipedia has a company of some sort, does it not? And Mozilla's a company. 2. So what? Yes, the console-specific stuff has to be kept secret, that sucks, but it's better than not having support for consoles at all. 3. Okay? Godot isn't just being used by "regular individuals", whatever that means, it's being used by people who want to make games and then sell them -- including, yes, companies -- and those people want to be able to publish games to consoles. That last one is just bizarre. Who do they think their userbase is, exactly? "People who want to make games for PC and mobile but have zero interest in any consoles ever"?
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      > People who want to make games for PC and mobile but have zero interest in any consoles ever I don’t understand why you are surprised by this? By your own admission, nobody that wants to develop for consoles would use Godot, so logically, their entire userbase are people that don’t want to do that.
      - TulliusCicero 4y ago
        Can't tell if serious or satire. There are absolutely people interested in using Godot as a game engine, including using it to make games for consoles. But many don't, because porting to consoles is painful and expensive, apparently involving third parties as a general rule. Obviously people for whom porting to consoles is a high priority are unlikely to choose Godot right this second, but we're talking about potential users as well, not just the current exact userbase.
        Aeolun 4y ago
        I just don’t think that ‘potential users’ are a really strong consideration for what ultimately amounts to a hobby project (or a project with no corporate backing anyway).
        TulliusCicero 4y ago
        I don't know what your objection is. They make a game engine, they support PC and mobile by default, console is the obvious missing piece of functionality. I can understand why it's lower priority because yeah, it's harder to support, but at least one of the devs works on this full time, and the two core devs have been working on this for several years now. I think it's a bit beyond hobby project, they're clearly trying to compete with Unity, even if it's not a for-profit company. If you read articles like this, it doesn't sound like a small hobby project anymore: https://godotengine.org/article/donation-changes https://godotengine.org/article/donation-changes Granted, it's still small potatoes compared to Unity, no doubt. edit: huh, looks like they have several people full-time, from the article > Godot is developed by more than a thousand contributors, and coordinating this massive community requires a full-time involvement of several of us (and hopefully soon even more full-timers), which your generosity enables. edit2: holy shit Unity had 5000 employees in 2021 according to Wikipedia. I knew they were fairly big but goddamn, didn't think they'd be that big. Man, now I'm also confused at how they can have a successful, popular game engine with a flourishing asset store and yet still be losing money. Just hired too many people?

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Yes. This is the main and only major thing that is holding Godot back from mass indie adoption. I would choose GMS2 or Unity over Godot for a 2D commercial indie project even though GML is worthless on a resume and Unity has all the Unity problems, because they build to all the consoles. Or Defold, since it is really nice and at least can target Switch. And I would choose Unreal or Unity or maybe even Cocos Creator (which recently added Switch support) for a 3D project for the same reason. If you want mass adoption, you need to make it financially viable for commercial indies to use your engine, and good luck convincing those people if they know they need to hire a 3rd party company to port to consoles. Since Godot can't really go the console route, though, they basically need to do the work of figuring out how their users can make enough money on just web, mobile, and/or desktop, and then articulate and successfully sell that solution to them. Steam Deck could help for sure, but it's a big ask

TulliusCicero 4y ago
> Since Godot can't really go the console route Wait, why not? I thought it was a deliberate choice on the devs' part not to prioritize native support for consoles, not something that's actually impossible (since obviously other third party engines do it).
- skneko 4y ago
  As explained in [0]: - To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot does not have such a legal figure. - Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license. [0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/blob/master/tutorials/platform/consoles.rst https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/blob/master/tutori...
  - eropple 4y ago
    MonoGame gets around it by having core team members that grant access to private trees for approved developers. It's not open source, but it's available.

remram 4y ago

The consoles make this explicitly incompatible with open source though. That could possibly be a separate entity I suppose, or hopefully if Godot becomes big enough the consoles could arrange something.

remram 4y ago
Seems like they might be reading HN, posted yesterday: Godot and consoles, all you need to know https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32119337)

Aeolun 4y ago

I don’t think that’s necessary at all, since it’d take away from core Godot development.

Mikeb85 4y ago

Why? It's dependency-free C++. It's easy to port.

juanuys 4y ago

This just published since your comment: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...