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Developing Godot Projects with Neovim

189 points by poga 4y ago

cassepipe 4y ago
I am curious. What's the point of having yet another DSL for scripting when there are established scripting languages like the Lua/Teal/Luau/Janet family ?
- mromnia 4y ago
  This is actually explained in the Godot docs: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/about/faq.html#what-is-gdscript-and-why-should-i-use-it https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/about/faq.html#what-i...
  - ArcherGarcia 4y ago
    Thanks!
mhaberl 4y ago
Godot has a lot going for it. Standing in its way was the wide adoption of Unity. I feel that the merger with ironSource maybe removed that hurdle.
- Schinken_ 4y ago
  Being part of "the German Godot Discord" Server and skimming through the Godot subreddit from time to time. Yes, yes it helped. Several people are asking for advice on how to make the switch.
  - thn-gap 4y ago
    How can I find and join this Discord server?
- MarcellusDrum 4y ago
  It's a cliché at this point, but 4.0 (or more realistically, 4.1/4.2) would be the milestone that would result in professional adoption of Godot. 3D is still at indie-level now, and requires a lot of workarounds and hacks for some advanced stuff.
  - largerapeanut 4y ago
    There is lots of truth behind the cliche. I've been trying out it's features the whole time alpha version's been out, and it's on a different level both in terms of usability and performance. Keeping in mind of course that alphas can be quite unstable and require you to untangle yourself every now and then. I'd advise most to wait atleast until beta
    - prox 4y ago
      Yeah, another 4 alpha user, here. There were a few regressions while developing in Alpha, but 4 is shaping up to be really good. Even if you don’t go for godot as your main engine, the speed with which you can prototype is really nice.
- blensor 4y ago
  Not sure why you have been downvoted as I have seen a lot of that sentiment on twitter and youtube already. I do not believe that this ironSource thing or the comments from the CEO will cause a real downfall of Unity but I do believe that VR is the area where Godot has the chance to sidestep the huge lead of Unity and shine as a real competitor. Because the technology is still changing very rapidly and no one has too big a lead on others (especially with standalone headsets). Godot even had support for Oculus hand tracking in late 2019 when it was not officially released for Unity and Unreal. At the moment everyone manufacturer is building for Unity first and everything else second (if at all), but when OpenXR finally has established itself that will be a lot less of a factor
  - m12k 4y ago
    I think it's more likely that Unity will end up in a situation similar to Apple during the period where they messed up the Mac Pro and Macbook Pro - not losing huge sales, but the creative trendsetters that used to be their biggest evangelists will start looking for alternatives.
  - Pulcinella 4y ago
    The Unity situation is definitely weird and Unity basically introduced a lot of FUD about itself. I know a lot of indies are worried about things like Unity pushing microtransactions on all developers. I think I would be worried even if I was the developer of one of those huge microtransaction games. Unity has probably seen how much money Apple and Google are making from their cut of microtransactions while Unity itself is only making money from the engine seat licensing (at least that’s my understanding. I don’t believe Unity collects royalties). I wouldn’t be surprised if Unity tries to change licensing for future versions of the engine to try to get it’s own slice of the microtransaction money.
- largerapeanut 4y ago
  What I'd see as a more of an obstacle is the lack of an asset store. Unity asset store has tons of stuff in it for very cheap and it's integrated straight into unity
  - tpxl 4y ago
    There is an official asset library that only allows (F)OSS licensed stuff, and there are third party stores (but I don't know which is the best/most successful).
- bootloop 4y ago
  It hardly can be considered for a serious commercial project without having a engine team already. But for hobbyist it might become a good choice and the popularity definitly helps.
  - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    Might be a nitpick, but there’s also the problem of what exactly we are calling a “serious commercial project”. Right now the most successful game made with Godot Engine is Cruelty Squad (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/). Regardless of if you would call it “professional” or not, it was one of the most noted indie games of 2021, had great reviews, and probably was much more commercially successful than your average Unity/Unreal “professional” indie title (given how so many of them flop). Same goes for some highly successful RPG Maker games, which usually people would not call it a “commercial-quality” engine. I think there’s a lesson here: don’t care that much if you’re using a “commercial” quality engine or not, just care if the engine will give the right tools to make the game that you envision.
    - fezfight 4y ago
      https://store.steampowered.com/app/1249480/ExZodiac/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1249480/ExZodiac/ Here's an absolutely beautiful commercial game made in Godot.
    - abledon 4y ago
      miziziziz's wrought flesh has some great devlogs on the godot journey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpFgdvG_WmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpFgdvG_WmI
    - ehnto 4y ago
      There are still people out there rolling their own engines for commercial projects, it's all about what you can pull off with the tools you've chosen. But I would agree that there's a professional network and support system around Unity that Godot currently doesn't have. If you're planning to hire a team, it'd be much easier to find good Unity developers than Godot devs.
- ehnto 4y ago
  I've already seen some Unity expats in a game dev discord I'm part of, starting to pick up Godot. It's not just the ironSource merge, the CEO has made their focus ad-tech and monetization, whilst the game engine itself is still grappling with split focus issues and playing catch-up with Unreal. It's hard not to see that as a creative indie-dev and conclude that you're probably not the target market for the engine anymore.
pasabagi 4y ago
The godot language server also seems really nice. You just add something like: lspconfig.gdscript.setup({}) to your init.lua (or equivalent in init.vim), then it works with the normal neovim autocomplete. More significantly, it means you can get the really great godot docs in a floaty window bubble without any context-switching.
- ido 4y ago
  How much worse is support for c# than for GDScript? We want to move away from unity and the whole team is already fluent in c#.
  - Hasnep 4y ago
    Not an expert in Godot and definitely not an expert in C#, but I'd say the only real difference is that the documentation for GDScript is slightly better and there are significantly more tutorials for using GDScript than C# with Godot. All of the functions and concepts that are used in GDScript have an equivalent in C#, and you normally can just use the same function in camelCase. You can use both languages in one project, so I'd recommend trying GDScript at first. It's a very simple language so it can be picked up quickly, but as soon as you feel yourself reaching for LINQ or wanting a proper type system then switch that script to C#.
    - billfruit 4y ago
      What about for C++? Reading the docs, the C++ support seems somewhat of a side-show, and documentation seems patchy on it.
      - qwery 4y ago
        I'm not sure if you are referring to GDNative which is the native/binary "scripting" interface, or hacking on the engine code itself. Neither are the primary way to use Godot -- the documentation reflects that, I guess. A lot of the documentation is not language specific, and a lot of the topics covered are fundamental. The engine code is great. It's structured logically and navigating it is intuitive. Building the engine is simple, customisable, and documented well. Significant chunks of the engine are integrated as compiled in 'modules'. You can add your own modules and the build system lets you select which modules to include. Adding new node types and working with the scripting/binding system is pretty straight-forward. I think the documentation for working on the engine[0] and contributing to the project[1] (as well as the code itself) are areas where Godot is doing exceptionally well. GDNative can be used to integrate external libraries, add support for other languages[2], without compiling the engine. You can use it as a scripting layer, add node types, etc. I haven't used GDNative non-trivially. * [0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/development/cpp/index.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/development/cpp/index... * [1] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/contributing/index.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/contributin... * [2] https://github.com/godot-rust/godot-rust https://github.com/godot-rust/godot-rust
mathnode 4y ago
For more Godot goodness I recommend, Martin Donald, a technical artist whom has a great mini-series of re-creating various game effects using Godot: - https://www.youtube.com/c/MartinDonald/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/MartinDonald/videos It makes a huge change from the tsunami of "I made pong for breakfast" level of material on youtube.
- chii 4y ago
  That's a great channel (given there's a recent thread about great youtube channels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32220192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32220192 ). For people who are less graphically inclined, but still want to check out godot, here's a great 2D simple code-along from the channel HeartBeast - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9FzW-m48fn16W1Sz5bhTd1ArQQv4f-Cm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9FzW-m48fn16W1Sz5bhT... It's a pixel platformer, and is intended to show you the various 2D features of godot as well as be a tutorial.
  - syeare 4y ago
    Though I am no expert and am unsure whether this remains the case, I recall reading some time ago that Heartbeast had some bad practices in his code and that it was better to learn from GDQuest/Nathan Lovato's content instead. His content is also recommended on the official docs at https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/tutorials.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/tutorials.h... GDQuest made an excellent web"app" (also available as a desktop application, I believe all versions are made in Godot) that provides an interactive introduction to GDScript: https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript It's my favorite resource for learning Godot and I can heartily recommend GDQ's channel https://youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ/playlists https://youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ/playlis...
    - shantnutiwari 4y ago
      Hard disagree. I dont like GDQuest, as he uses every fancy/advanced technique he knows in his free and paid courses, which means its very hard to understand whats going on. Heartbeast only focusses on one concept at a time, which makes it easy to follow whats going on. People criticising Heartbeast are the same type of people who make fun of beginners programming tutorials "Lol, doesnt even use Kubernetes, deploying manually. Teaching bad practices lol" GDquest makes a type 2 mistake (from my blog[0]) where he uses advanced techniques, more it seems to me to impress others rather than to help readers. I bought their courses, but couldn't finish any as I struggled to follow the 20+ concepts being taught at the same time. 0. https://new.pythonforengineers.com/blog/the-problem-with-most-programming-tutorials-books/ https://new.pythonforengineers.com/blog/the-problem-with-mos...
sylware 4y ago
On linux based OSes, Godot must generate pure and simple ELF64 binaries which do libdl everything from the system, and that means: * no C/c++ main(), but the sysv ABI entry point (which is basically main() anyway). When the libc will be libdl-ed, the init functions are called with the same arguments stack than the sysv ABI entry point. * interact with system TLS-ized variable with only the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr(), for instance if there is a need to use errno. I have to admit, I did not get really into this issue yet (but there my be seriously nasty things related to the "TLS offset"). * fork the static gcc/clang libstdc++ in order to libdl-ize it, because even with -static-libstdc++/-static-libgcc options, it won't libdl what it requires from the system libs (gcc devs 100% at fault here, they have been carefully ignoring the availability of games on linux OSes for a decade). rant[on], to avoid this and the dependency on the very few c++ compilers (because c++ syntax is beyond sanity), godot should have been a simple and lean C project, rant[off]. Currently, the only way to mitigate the GNU symbol versoning abuse from the glibc devs (100% their fault), is to compile/link against a years old glibc (_REALLY_ old). That said, they should od exactly the same on other OSes, which means the code structure would be the same, only different compile-time and runtime function tables.
caniszczyk 4y ago
I'd also check out https://www.o3de.org https://www.o3de.org if you're looking for an open source gaming engine

189 points by poga 4y ago

I am curious. What's the point of having yet another DSL for scripting when there are established scripting languages like the Lua/Teal/Luau/Janet family ?

mromnia 4y ago
This is actually explained in the Godot docs: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/about/faq.html#what-is-gdscript-and-why-should-i-use-it https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/about/faq.html#what-i...
- ArcherGarcia 4y ago
  Thanks!

mhaberl 4y ago

Godot has a lot going for it. Standing in its way was the wide adoption of Unity. I feel that the merger with ironSource maybe removed that hurdle.

Schinken_ 4y ago
Being part of "the German Godot Discord" Server and skimming through the Godot subreddit from time to time. Yes, yes it helped. Several people are asking for advice on how to make the switch.
- thn-gap 4y ago
  How can I find and join this Discord server?
MarcellusDrum 4y ago
It's a cliché at this point, but 4.0 (or more realistically, 4.1/4.2) would be the milestone that would result in professional adoption of Godot. 3D is still at indie-level now, and requires a lot of workarounds and hacks for some advanced stuff.
- largerapeanut 4y ago
  There is lots of truth behind the cliche. I've been trying out it's features the whole time alpha version's been out, and it's on a different level both in terms of usability and performance. Keeping in mind of course that alphas can be quite unstable and require you to untangle yourself every now and then. I'd advise most to wait atleast until beta
  - prox 4y ago
    Yeah, another 4 alpha user, here. There were a few regressions while developing in Alpha, but 4 is shaping up to be really good. Even if you don’t go for godot as your main engine, the speed with which you can prototype is really nice.
blensor 4y ago
Not sure why you have been downvoted as I have seen a lot of that sentiment on twitter and youtube already. I do not believe that this ironSource thing or the comments from the CEO will cause a real downfall of Unity but I do believe that VR is the area where Godot has the chance to sidestep the huge lead of Unity and shine as a real competitor. Because the technology is still changing very rapidly and no one has too big a lead on others (especially with standalone headsets). Godot even had support for Oculus hand tracking in late 2019 when it was not officially released for Unity and Unreal. At the moment everyone manufacturer is building for Unity first and everything else second (if at all), but when OpenXR finally has established itself that will be a lot less of a factor
- m12k 4y ago
  I think it's more likely that Unity will end up in a situation similar to Apple during the period where they messed up the Mac Pro and Macbook Pro - not losing huge sales, but the creative trendsetters that used to be their biggest evangelists will start looking for alternatives.
- Pulcinella 4y ago
  The Unity situation is definitely weird and Unity basically introduced a lot of FUD about itself. I know a lot of indies are worried about things like Unity pushing microtransactions on all developers. I think I would be worried even if I was the developer of one of those huge microtransaction games. Unity has probably seen how much money Apple and Google are making from their cut of microtransactions while Unity itself is only making money from the engine seat licensing (at least that’s my understanding. I don’t believe Unity collects royalties). I wouldn’t be surprised if Unity tries to change licensing for future versions of the engine to try to get it’s own slice of the microtransaction money.
largerapeanut 4y ago
What I'd see as a more of an obstacle is the lack of an asset store. Unity asset store has tons of stuff in it for very cheap and it's integrated straight into unity
- tpxl 4y ago
  There is an official asset library that only allows (F)OSS licensed stuff, and there are third party stores (but I don't know which is the best/most successful).
bootloop 4y ago
It hardly can be considered for a serious commercial project without having a engine team already. But for hobbyist it might become a good choice and the popularity definitly helps.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  Might be a nitpick, but there’s also the problem of what exactly we are calling a “serious commercial project”. Right now the most successful game made with Godot Engine is Cruelty Squad (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/). Regardless of if you would call it “professional” or not, it was one of the most noted indie games of 2021, had great reviews, and probably was much more commercially successful than your average Unity/Unreal “professional” indie title (given how so many of them flop). Same goes for some highly successful RPG Maker games, which usually people would not call it a “commercial-quality” engine. I think there’s a lesson here: don’t care that much if you’re using a “commercial” quality engine or not, just care if the engine will give the right tools to make the game that you envision.
  - fezfight 4y ago
    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1249480/ExZodiac/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1249480/ExZodiac/ Here's an absolutely beautiful commercial game made in Godot.
  - abledon 4y ago
    miziziziz's wrought flesh has some great devlogs on the godot journey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpFgdvG_WmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpFgdvG_WmI
  - ehnto 4y ago
    There are still people out there rolling their own engines for commercial projects, it's all about what you can pull off with the tools you've chosen. But I would agree that there's a professional network and support system around Unity that Godot currently doesn't have. If you're planning to hire a team, it'd be much easier to find good Unity developers than Godot devs.
ehnto 4y ago
I've already seen some Unity expats in a game dev discord I'm part of, starting to pick up Godot. It's not just the ironSource merge, the CEO has made their focus ad-tech and monetization, whilst the game engine itself is still grappling with split focus issues and playing catch-up with Unreal. It's hard not to see that as a creative indie-dev and conclude that you're probably not the target market for the engine anymore.

pasabagi 4y ago

The godot language server also seems really nice. You just add something like: lspconfig.gdscript.setup({}) to your init.lua (or equivalent in init.vim), then it works with the normal neovim autocomplete. More significantly, it means you can get the really great godot docs in a floaty window bubble without any context-switching.

ido 4y ago
How much worse is support for c# than for GDScript? We want to move away from unity and the whole team is already fluent in c#.
- Hasnep 4y ago
  Not an expert in Godot and definitely not an expert in C#, but I'd say the only real difference is that the documentation for GDScript is slightly better and there are significantly more tutorials for using GDScript than C# with Godot. All of the functions and concepts that are used in GDScript have an equivalent in C#, and you normally can just use the same function in camelCase. You can use both languages in one project, so I'd recommend trying GDScript at first. It's a very simple language so it can be picked up quickly, but as soon as you feel yourself reaching for LINQ or wanting a proper type system then switch that script to C#.
  - billfruit 4y ago
    What about for C++? Reading the docs, the C++ support seems somewhat of a side-show, and documentation seems patchy on it.
    - qwery 4y ago
      I'm not sure if you are referring to GDNative which is the native/binary "scripting" interface, or hacking on the engine code itself. Neither are the primary way to use Godot -- the documentation reflects that, I guess. A lot of the documentation is not language specific, and a lot of the topics covered are fundamental. The engine code is great. It's structured logically and navigating it is intuitive. Building the engine is simple, customisable, and documented well. Significant chunks of the engine are integrated as compiled in 'modules'. You can add your own modules and the build system lets you select which modules to include. Adding new node types and working with the scripting/binding system is pretty straight-forward. I think the documentation for working on the engine[0] and contributing to the project[1] (as well as the code itself) are areas where Godot is doing exceptionally well. GDNative can be used to integrate external libraries, add support for other languages[2], without compiling the engine. You can use it as a scripting layer, add node types, etc. I haven't used GDNative non-trivially. * [0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/development/cpp/index.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/development/cpp/index... * [1] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/contributing/index.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/contributin... * [2] https://github.com/godot-rust/godot-rust https://github.com/godot-rust/godot-rust

mathnode 4y ago

For more Godot goodness I recommend, Martin Donald, a technical artist whom has a great mini-series of re-creating various game effects using Godot: - https://www.youtube.com/c/MartinDonald/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/MartinDonald/videos It makes a huge change from the tsunami of "I made pong for breakfast" level of material on youtube.

chii 4y ago
That's a great channel (given there's a recent thread about great youtube channels https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32220192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32220192 ). For people who are less graphically inclined, but still want to check out godot, here's a great 2D simple code-along from the channel HeartBeast - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9FzW-m48fn16W1Sz5bhTd1ArQQv4f-Cm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9FzW-m48fn16W1Sz5bhT... It's a pixel platformer, and is intended to show you the various 2D features of godot as well as be a tutorial.
- syeare 4y ago
  Though I am no expert and am unsure whether this remains the case, I recall reading some time ago that Heartbeast had some bad practices in his code and that it was better to learn from GDQuest/Nathan Lovato's content instead. His content is also recommended on the official docs at https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/tutorials.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/community/tutorials.h... GDQuest made an excellent web"app" (also available as a desktop application, I believe all versions are made in Godot) that provides an interactive introduction to GDScript: https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript It's my favorite resource for learning Godot and I can heartily recommend GDQ's channel https://youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ/playlists https://youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ/playlis...
  - shantnutiwari 4y ago
    Hard disagree. I dont like GDQuest, as he uses every fancy/advanced technique he knows in his free and paid courses, which means its very hard to understand whats going on. Heartbeast only focusses on one concept at a time, which makes it easy to follow whats going on. People criticising Heartbeast are the same type of people who make fun of beginners programming tutorials "Lol, doesnt even use Kubernetes, deploying manually. Teaching bad practices lol" GDquest makes a type 2 mistake (from my blog[0]) where he uses advanced techniques, more it seems to me to impress others rather than to help readers. I bought their courses, but couldn't finish any as I struggled to follow the 20+ concepts being taught at the same time. 0. https://new.pythonforengineers.com/blog/the-problem-with-most-programming-tutorials-books/ https://new.pythonforengineers.com/blog/the-problem-with-mos...

sylware 4y ago

On linux based OSes, Godot must generate pure and simple ELF64 binaries which do libdl everything from the system, and that means: * no C/c++ main(), but the sysv ABI entry point (which is basically main() anyway). When the libc will be libdl-ed, the init functions are called with the same arguments stack than the sysv ABI entry point. * interact with system TLS-ized variable with only the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr(), for instance if there is a need to use errno. I have to admit, I did not get really into this issue yet (but there my be seriously nasty things related to the "TLS offset"). * fork the static gcc/clang libstdc++ in order to libdl-ize it, because even with -static-libstdc++/-static-libgcc options, it won't libdl what it requires from the system libs (gcc devs 100% at fault here, they have been carefully ignoring the availability of games on linux OSes for a decade). rant[on], to avoid this and the dependency on the very few c++ compilers (because c++ syntax is beyond sanity), godot should have been a simple and lean C project, rant[off]. Currently, the only way to mitigate the GNU symbol versoning abuse from the glibc devs (100% their fault), is to compile/link against a years old glibc (_REALLY_ old). That said, they should od exactly the same on other OSes, which means the code structure would be the same, only different compile-time and runtime function tables.

caniszczyk 4y ago

I'd also check out https://www.o3de.org https://www.o3de.org if you're looking for an open source gaming engine