8 ms·

Godot 4 Release Candidate 1

165 points by kagbor 4y ago

hitpointdrew 4y ago
Really exiting, I love Godot and have been using the beta releases. I just really hope they fixed the bug where you cannot rename nodes if you running KDE Plasma Wayland (first in beta 15 and I believe exits through beta 17).
yalue 4y ago
As much as I'm looking forward to 4, has GDExtension been stabilized / documented yet? I know there's the existing C++ example [1], but I really, really don't want to jump through a scons & C++ project simply to call a single native function in a DLL. You can do such a thing with GDNative, and I presume that it is possible in GDExtension as well, though it isn't obvious how to do so. This strikes me as a huge barrier to adoption, since GDNative is one of the big things that will be incompatible with 4. [1] In the godot-cpp library: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-cpp https://github.com/godotengine/godot-cpp
- milliams 4y ago
  There's an ongoing discussion at [1, 2] which highlights an important difference between GDNative and GDExtension in terms of what the developers expect them to be used for. A lot of people were using GDNative as a way of writing game logic in other programming languages (particularly I've seen this with Rust), but GDExtension seems to be designed to allow people to write editor plugins (e.g. things like a voxel node type, or a custom GUI tool). Each pligin currently seems to provide a custom Node in its own right, not the ability to hook into existing nodes. This is why at the moment, you cannot live-reload a compiled GDExtension library, as the assumption is that it's a product that being provided to the user of the editor, not something which the game developer is directly creating. I think there might be some mechanisms/hooks to allow this to work as wanted, but it has to work quite differently. [1] https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/4437 https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/4437 [2] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/66231 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/66231
  - iFire 4y ago
    Faolan-Rad and I (fire) are working in that area https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/72883 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/72883 "LibGodot is a system to allows Godot to be compiled as a library and connected into it using GDExtensions by giving a function pointer to the entry point of a GDExtension implementation"
  - yalue 4y ago
    Yes, I was in the first category of people, where I am using GDNative to ultimately call a single function written in Go, not due to speed, but simply in order to leverage a huge amount of code I had already written in that language. Judging by the GDExtension headers, I can probably pull off something similar if I forgo all of the C++ bindings that I don't need. However, I am hesitant to dedicate any time to doing so at the moment. Don't get me wrong, GDExtension seems awesome, but it's also true that it doesn't seem geared towards the case that I was using GDNative for.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  I've seen on their Discord where before they release the next version they call upon the community to help document all the new features before release if I remember correctly. Maybe a good issue to bring up before it gets looked over.
- TheDesolate0 4y ago
  [dead]
lazypenguin 4y ago
Congratulations to the Godot team for reaching this milestone. As someone who leads a team working on a game project using an old, custom engine we have a quiet desire to switch to a different engine. There is a temptation to consider investing in Godot over one of the other tried and true engines due to its leanness and open source nature but still feels like a gamble for a 3D project. I wish there were more people talking about their experience with Godot beyond a hobby level.
- TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  I feel the same way. Godot has made amazing progress ... both in the engine and in the community. But it's still "very early" in terms of adoption for big commercial teams. Having said that, depending on the genre of game your team is making, it could very well be a good choice. Perhaps not for a AAA 3D title ... but for other genres where having cutting edge visuals isn't the most relevant part of the content. I for one am hoping there's a Rust-based engine on the horizon in the next 5 years (Bevy perhaps?)
- cptcobalt 4y ago
  > As someone who leads a team working on a game project using an old, custom engine we have a quiet desire to switch to a different engine. Curious about the reasoning behind this? Has your engine had good technical leadership, or is it tacked together based on need? (If I were starting a studio today, I'd strongly prefer build an engine for our teams from the ground up, but that's certainly counter to the intuition of most, and likely inadvisable.) As a builder on the team of one of the largest deployed Godot projects, it is certainly effective and I'm incredibly glad exists—I am very happy to use it, but it's not without its pain points. I rate it significantly better than Unity, a fair bit worse than Unreal (but ), open source is a major benefit (we have our own modifications), and there are some peculiar maintainer/code/project decisions...but we can deal with it. All that said, we'll probably never be able to upgrade to Godot 4, but Godot 4 looks damn good.
  - lazypenguin 4y ago
    Ultimately we probably won’t switch but our game runs on a 20 year old engine that has had no updates in all that time. Directx9, no pixel shaders, poor performance, custom formats, windows only and no interoperability with modern formats. We don’t have any graphics or engine specialists on the team so upgrades on that front are challenging. However all of these can be overcome the biggest enticement is the editor platform. Our current tooling system is dire and making good tooling is such a time sink. Being able to build tools within another platform is inticing while also getting other advantages such as cross platform deploy, asset imports, UI framework, etc. is tempting. The grass is always greener!
EamonnMR 4y ago
Sweet, time to update my project from Beta to RC. The changes to GDscript have been awesome. I'll be digging into more of the network changes next.
loufe 4y ago
Just started a game project with some friends in Godot 3 in December. Already see some things (Await comes to mind) that would've been great had we opted for 4. Still, it's hard to sign on to an unsettled technology for our first ever game. Who knows, maybe we'll consider upgrading if it looks manageable.
capableweb 4y ago
This mostly contains a bunch of fixes or QoL improvements, and might not be easy to get into if you don't know the linked issues already. A better introduction to Godot 4 might be the following blog post: https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-0-beta-1/ https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-0-beta-... Has pretty pictures and everything too.
- imtringued 4y ago
  I started a very simple simulator in Godot and I don't want to reimplement everything in GDscript or use a library. So I put it on hold for Godot 4 because of the navigation improvements.
mortenjorck 4y ago
On a scale of 1 (Inkscape vs. Illustrator) to 10 (Blender vs. Cinema4D), where would people say Godot vs. Unity is right now?
- kramerger 4y ago
  A solid 7. Maybe a 8 if you don't care about console support and mostly do 2d games.
  - CBarkleyU 4y ago
    Im sorry, but in what world is Godot not an 11 compared to Unity for "2D games && !consoles"?
- ecshafer 4y ago
  If I were making a 2d only game and didn't care about consoles, 10. Godot > unity | unreal. 3d games, Unreal is still the king imo. Maybe Godot 4 will change this a bit. But I really do not like Unity so I might be biased. FYI Godot's shortcomings in consoles is an issue with the console manufacturers not the engine.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ehutch79 4y ago
    Apparently the founders are involved with a commercial entity to solve the console issue
- bodge5000 4y ago
  I'd say it depends, though I suppose the same could be said for Blender vs Cinema4D. Overall, if I had to put a number on it I'd say a 7, however that cuts both ways, I could say that Godot is 70% as good as Unity or that Unity is 70% as good as Godot. I migrated from Unity to Godot a few years ago because its open source, but now even if Unity went the same way I doubt I'd go back. The only things I really miss about Unity are the solid features for 3D (but Godot is getting there) and the choice for using a generic, performance orientated language over a built-in, ease-of-use orientated language (which I don't see changing anytime soon, though mono support is improving). That last one is especially important to me, but I'd be more likely to move onto another open source engine/framework than back to Unity.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Really impressed that they're supporting dotnet six and are in active testing of their support of dotnet seven. IIRC, Unity is currently supporting dotnet three.
cmdrk 4y ago
Super exciting that the wait is almost over. Now I can finally go rebase all of my plugins against the new GDScript now that it's stabilized a bit. Seems there were a number of small but breaking changes between the beta releases. Overall the betas have been fairly pleasant to use. Hoping that the Godot team will consider producing double precision binaries now that we're closer to release. It's a small pain to have to build from source and divine the right flags etc.

165 points by kagbor 4y ago

Really exiting, I love Godot and have been using the beta releases. I just really hope they fixed the bug where you cannot rename nodes if you running KDE Plasma Wayland (first in beta 15 and I believe exits through beta 17).

yalue 4y ago

As much as I'm looking forward to 4, has GDExtension been stabilized / documented yet? I know there's the existing C++ example [1], but I really, really don't want to jump through a scons & C++ project simply to call a single native function in a DLL. You can do such a thing with GDNative, and I presume that it is possible in GDExtension as well, though it isn't obvious how to do so. This strikes me as a huge barrier to adoption, since GDNative is one of the big things that will be incompatible with 4. [1] In the godot-cpp library: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-cpp https://github.com/godotengine/godot-cpp

milliams 4y ago
There's an ongoing discussion at [1, 2] which highlights an important difference between GDNative and GDExtension in terms of what the developers expect them to be used for. A lot of people were using GDNative as a way of writing game logic in other programming languages (particularly I've seen this with Rust), but GDExtension seems to be designed to allow people to write editor plugins (e.g. things like a voxel node type, or a custom GUI tool). Each pligin currently seems to provide a custom Node in its own right, not the ability to hook into existing nodes. This is why at the moment, you cannot live-reload a compiled GDExtension library, as the assumption is that it's a product that being provided to the user of the editor, not something which the game developer is directly creating. I think there might be some mechanisms/hooks to allow this to work as wanted, but it has to work quite differently. [1] https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/4437 https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/4437 [2] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/66231 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/66231
- iFire 4y ago
  Faolan-Rad and I (fire) are working in that area https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/72883 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/72883 "LibGodot is a system to allows Godot to be compiled as a library and connected into it using GDExtensions by giving a function pointer to the entry point of a GDExtension implementation"
- yalue 4y ago
  Yes, I was in the first category of people, where I am using GDNative to ultimately call a single function written in Go, not due to speed, but simply in order to leverage a huge amount of code I had already written in that language. Judging by the GDExtension headers, I can probably pull off something similar if I forgo all of the C++ bindings that I don't need. However, I am hesitant to dedicate any time to doing so at the moment. Don't get me wrong, GDExtension seems awesome, but it's also true that it doesn't seem geared towards the case that I was using GDNative for.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
I've seen on their Discord where before they release the next version they call upon the community to help document all the new features before release if I remember correctly. Maybe a good issue to bring up before it gets looked over.
TheDesolate0 4y ago
[dead]

lazypenguin 4y ago

Congratulations to the Godot team for reaching this milestone. As someone who leads a team working on a game project using an old, custom engine we have a quiet desire to switch to a different engine. There is a temptation to consider investing in Godot over one of the other tried and true engines due to its leanness and open source nature but still feels like a gamble for a 3D project. I wish there were more people talking about their experience with Godot beyond a hobby level.

TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
I feel the same way. Godot has made amazing progress ... both in the engine and in the community. But it's still "very early" in terms of adoption for big commercial teams. Having said that, depending on the genre of game your team is making, it could very well be a good choice. Perhaps not for a AAA 3D title ... but for other genres where having cutting edge visuals isn't the most relevant part of the content. I for one am hoping there's a Rust-based engine on the horizon in the next 5 years (Bevy perhaps?)
cptcobalt 4y ago
> As someone who leads a team working on a game project using an old, custom engine we have a quiet desire to switch to a different engine. Curious about the reasoning behind this? Has your engine had good technical leadership, or is it tacked together based on need? (If I were starting a studio today, I'd strongly prefer build an engine for our teams from the ground up, but that's certainly counter to the intuition of most, and likely inadvisable.) As a builder on the team of one of the largest deployed Godot projects, it is certainly effective and I'm incredibly glad exists—I am very happy to use it, but it's not without its pain points. I rate it significantly better than Unity, a fair bit worse than Unreal (but ), open source is a major benefit (we have our own modifications), and there are some peculiar maintainer/code/project decisions...but we can deal with it. All that said, we'll probably never be able to upgrade to Godot 4, but Godot 4 looks damn good.
- lazypenguin 4y ago
  Ultimately we probably won’t switch but our game runs on a 20 year old engine that has had no updates in all that time. Directx9, no pixel shaders, poor performance, custom formats, windows only and no interoperability with modern formats. We don’t have any graphics or engine specialists on the team so upgrades on that front are challenging. However all of these can be overcome the biggest enticement is the editor platform. Our current tooling system is dire and making good tooling is such a time sink. Being able to build tools within another platform is inticing while also getting other advantages such as cross platform deploy, asset imports, UI framework, etc. is tempting. The grass is always greener!

EamonnMR 4y ago

Sweet, time to update my project from Beta to RC. The changes to GDscript have been awesome. I'll be digging into more of the network changes next.

loufe 4y ago

Just started a game project with some friends in Godot 3 in December. Already see some things (Await comes to mind) that would've been great had we opted for 4. Still, it's hard to sign on to an unsettled technology for our first ever game. Who knows, maybe we'll consider upgrading if it looks manageable.

capableweb 4y ago

This mostly contains a bunch of fixes or QoL improvements, and might not be easy to get into if you don't know the linked issues already. A better introduction to Godot 4 might be the following blog post: https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-0-beta-1/ https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-0-beta-... Has pretty pictures and everything too.

imtringued 4y ago
I started a very simple simulator in Godot and I don't want to reimplement everything in GDscript or use a library. So I put it on hold for Godot 4 because of the navigation improvements.

mortenjorck 4y ago

On a scale of 1 (Inkscape vs. Illustrator) to 10 (Blender vs. Cinema4D), where would people say Godot vs. Unity is right now?

kramerger 4y ago
A solid 7. Maybe a 8 if you don't care about console support and mostly do 2d games.
- CBarkleyU 4y ago
  Im sorry, but in what world is Godot not an 11 compared to Unity for "2D games && !consoles"?
ecshafer 4y ago
If I were making a 2d only game and didn't care about consoles, 10. Godot > unity | unreal. 3d games, Unreal is still the king imo. Maybe Godot 4 will change this a bit. But I really do not like Unity so I might be biased. FYI Godot's shortcomings in consoles is an issue with the console manufacturers not the engine.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ehutch79 4y ago
  Apparently the founders are involved with a commercial entity to solve the console issue
bodge5000 4y ago
I'd say it depends, though I suppose the same could be said for Blender vs Cinema4D. Overall, if I had to put a number on it I'd say a 7, however that cuts both ways, I could say that Godot is 70% as good as Unity or that Unity is 70% as good as Godot. I migrated from Unity to Godot a few years ago because its open source, but now even if Unity went the same way I doubt I'd go back. The only things I really miss about Unity are the solid features for 3D (but Godot is getting there) and the choice for using a generic, performance orientated language over a built-in, ease-of-use orientated language (which I don't see changing anytime soon, though mono support is improving). That last one is especially important to me, but I'd be more likely to move onto another open source engine/framework than back to Unity.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

Really impressed that they're supporting dotnet six and are in active testing of their support of dotnet seven. IIRC, Unity is currently supporting dotnet three.

cmdrk 4y ago

Super exciting that the wait is almost over. Now I can finally go rebase all of my plugins against the new GDScript now that it's stabilized a bit. Seems there were a number of small but breaking changes between the beta releases. Overall the betas have been fairly pleasant to use. Hoping that the Godot team will consider producing double precision binaries now that we're closer to release. It's a small pain to have to build from source and divine the right flags etc.