19 ms·

Show HN: GodotOS – Fake operating system interface made in the Godot engine

• mysterydip 3y ago
  Reminds me of all the "OSes"/GUIs that got made back in the QBasic days: http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/ http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/ Always a fun project to do. Thanks for carrying the torch forward in something modern! ps, my favorite of the QBasic ones is probably M-GUI: http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/95_mgui.html http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/95_mgui.html which even included its own programming language to make apps in!
  • VMG 3y ago
    Fascinating. I wish I could run them in a browser VM - it would probably be pretty fast as well.
  • Retr0id 3y ago
    >Because this site still gets a lot of traffic, I'll be redesigning the site with more of a modern look and feel. [...] I'll try to keep you posted and hopefully won't get sidetracked. Looks like they did get sidetracked, and I'm glad! If the author is reading this, I think it's a great time capsule that's probably best left as-is.
    • chalst 3y ago
      Another time capsule, this time in the form of an endolink: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38938998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38938998
  • anticorporate 3y ago
    That was how I learned to program, back in the 90s when I was a teenager. But it was never what I meant to do. I was quite sure I was going to be a game developer. Knowing absolutely nothing about designing a game, managing a project, et cetera, I just starting writing games at the beginning, with a splash screen or animation, and then started writing the start GUI for the game. For a 13 year old pushing the boundary of what you could do with QBasic and mode 13h graphics, I never quite got past designing the GUI, but I made a heck of a lot of them.
  • luismedel 3y ago
    DOS-based GUIs were the rage in its days. In 1999 I coded a graphical environment for DOS using Borland's BGI in Turbo Pascal. I even used it in one of my uni assignments[0]. I still remember some afternoons in the library, helping pals with linked lists basics and finetuning my textbox scroll code. Good times. [0] https://github.com/luismedel/jugadores https://github.com/luismedel/jugadores edit: Forgot to add that I wrote a lot of code in paper :-)
  • franzb 3y ago
    This is absolutely amazing! It brings back great memories of my childhood when I was doing similar mock UIs in QBasic, then QuickBasic, Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. Thanks for sharing!
  • TonyTrapp 3y ago
    GIMI was quite impressive as well, also including its own programming language, but also getting some heavy-lifting weight from a handful of tools written in other languages: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gimi/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/gimi/
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• cl3misch 3y ago
  From the screenshot: > GodotOS is a fake operating system Is it fake, though? Does the term "operating system" imply the level of hardware it's running on? Otherwise, even if it's running on top of another OS, it's still an OS.
  • internetter 3y ago
    I feel like operating system implies the existence of a kernel
    • bluetomcat 3y ago
      An application that spawns processes/apps/modules, controls them and lets them communicate back to the application for some service is also, in a loose sense, an operating system.
      • trealira 3y ago
        That seems a bit too loose. Doesn't that apply to IDEs that implement the language server protocol, since they spawn language servers and communicate with them? And servers like Apache that spawn child processes to handle requests?
        • chuckadams 3y ago
          Apache supervises tasks in the form of threads and subprocesses, including managing memory in the form of pools, so yes, it's doing some of what an OS would do. It isn't, on the other hand, providing abstractions to hardware, and that's what I think of when I hear "OS". It's not really a cut-and-dried thing though: modern web browsers are like 90% of the way to being full-blown OS's, even down to abstracting hardware in the case of things like WebGPU, but they still rely on a host OS to bridge the connection and do the actual bit-banging required to make it work.
    • mikepurvis 3y ago
      Robot Operating System (ROS) is also an operating system, but it runs on top of computer operating systems like Linux and MacOS, and is focused on supplying the services, build toolchain, and communication standards/paradigms that are useful for implementing a robotics system, much as Linux (and its distros) are focused on providing that for a general computing environment. In any case, it's clear that the project under discussion here isn't really any of these things is rather a system shell/GUI/launcher. But calling it an "OS" falls under the fun tradition many of us enjoyed in our youth of trying to recreate our own Windows in whatever was our programming platform of choice, and thinking that was what an OS was.
• iosonofuturista 3y ago
  Popcar2 , a note on your disclaimer that you are not affiliated with the Godot foundation. Is that usual in projects using an engine? Or is it because of your , IMHO, poor naming choice. Think of this way, if the tagline of the project was “EstragonOS, a fake os made in godot”, would the disclaimer be so proeminent in the page? I think you know you are playing with fire, to make the disclaimer a larger font. It’s not too late, consider a rename.
  • popcar2 3y ago
    Thank you for the concern, I did indeed add it preemptively because of the project's name. The reason I chose "GodotOS" is because the project was initially intended to be a sort of tech demo for Godot's UI systems, and I spent most of my time in the official Godot Discord showcasing its development and getting lots of feedback. One of the contributors of the engine itself gave me the thumbs up. Of course, if anyone officially from Godot wants me to change the name and general branding I'll do so quickly. Right now, I think it should be fine.
    • ranting-moth 3y ago
      It's OK, I'll name my project Popcar2-OS.
  • nightowl_games 3y ago
    "playing with fire" I don't think the Godot Foundation would be against this.
    • ahoka 3y ago
      As a heard they are quite toxic, so who knows?
      • jermaustin1 3y ago
        From where?
• mentos 3y ago
  Would be fun if game engine editor environments took on the UI paradigm of an operating system like windows. So that instead of going to the File menu at the top of unreal engine to open the blueprint debugger, you navigated the start menu to find the program. I’ve reflected to myself so many times that UE4 feels like an operating system, would be fun if in the future it actually was ha
  • thinkingemote 3y ago
    I think that the Godot UI editor is written with Godot, so it should be possible!
  • Arelius 3y ago
    Eric Lengyel's C4 engine takes this approach.. it's a bit interesting https://c4engine.com/wiki/index.php?title=Quick_Tour https://c4engine.com/wiki/index.php?title=Quick_Tour
• gumballindie 3y ago
  Just the other day I was wondering - what would it take to develop a Linux WM in Godot?
  • arminiusreturns 3y ago
    Not that much actually if you don't mean as a full WM/DE replacement and instead as an on top layer; Godot 4.2 window management on linux is working quite smoothly for me, including multi-window support. From there what you do within the windows is where the magic happens. (see my other post)
    • gumballindie 3y ago
      What I mean is a full WM/DE replacement. I mean godot already handles graphics quite nicely. Imagine a desktop that you can control with shaders and runs on Vulkan. That'd be pretty neat.
      • arminiusreturns 3y ago
        I've thought about it but it seems daunting so I punted this idea for myself, but it depends on if you mean as an xorg/wayland replacement or if you mean to build on one of those, and even between those two they have a vastly different approach, but there are some minimal foundations that could be built on... For example, wlroots: "Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for building a Wayland compositor; or about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway." So it would also depend on if you mean raw WM or if you want compositing also etc.
  • tmpdbejdhejd 3y ago
    > Just the other day I was wondering - what would it take to develop a Linux WM in Godot? It bas been done : https://github.com/SimulaVR/gdwlroots https://github.com/SimulaVR/gdwlroots But it is not up to date with Godot 4. You can have your Firefox or Blender window be a regular texture inside a full Godot game, pretty crazy...
    • 3y ago
• scoopr 3y ago
  Heh, back when, I used to do (Q/Turbo)Basic stuff like: PRINT "Welcome!" INPUT "Password: ", pw$ and so on, with very little actual functionality. I guess some themes of toy projects are evergreen, even if the sophistication is on another level :)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• xyproto 3y ago
  It's a game launcher that uses Godot, but neither an OS nor connected with the Godot project. It's a bit like writing a game launcher in Rust and calling it RustOS.
  • bbkane 3y ago
    I think it's a fun name
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • palata 3y ago
    Isn't it a bit like making an app that uses Qt and start its name with a Q? Without giving any real name, I can invent "Qnotepad" which would be a notepad implemented with Qt. I know real projects that follow this pattern, and it never really bothered me that it was not connected to the Qt project (other than by using Qt).
    • xyproto 3y ago
      QNotepad is not something completely different like a calculator, though.
• davidy123 3y ago
  I guess that "a desktop that is minimalist, distraction-free, and aesthetically pleasing" means Windows 2000 with transparent backgrounds.
• baq 3y ago
  super bit boy made me instantly younger by about 15 years. thanks!
• gcr 3y ago
  Godot is a great sketchpad for these things. One time I was at the airport for a flight, so I wrote a quick-and-dirty notepad for the Russian pencil-and-paper game Virus War (“Война вирусов”) for my eInk tablet that my partner and I could play. It was just a grid with tappable buttons in varying states, but I was able to get a playable prototype ready for our flight.
• omgmajk 3y ago
  This is great, actually thinking of building something similar for a game I'm working on, but other way around really. OS in game instead of game in OS. :)
• emmanueloga_ 3y ago
  Looks great! I know there are a bunch of games that use this kind of setting (fake OS) as the main mechanic. Her Story comes to mind [1]. 1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/368370/Her_Story/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/368370/Her_Story/
  • koromak 3y ago
    Hypnospace Outlaw is the absolute MVP of this category. That game is a trip.
    • emmanueloga_ 3y ago
      Thanks for the mention! I remember playing a bit of the previous game from the same author (Dropsy!)
• rubymamis 3y ago
  We at a stage where desktop environments become faster than the OS they run on (ahem... Windows).
• felideon 3y ago
  This is great. Would you recommend Godot for prototyping UIs, in general, over HTML/JavaScript?
  • chalst 3y ago
    I guess you are aware, but Godot can be compiled to JavaScript: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/exporting_for_web.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/expo...
  • popcar2 3y ago
    Short answer: Yes! Long answer: I recommend Godot for rapid prototyping and creating desktop applications, but not necessarily for web app development. The biggest blocker is that Godot 4's export size is quite big compared to web standards, roughly 35MB uncompressed and 7.5MB compressed. The web version of GodotOS is 7.8MB, which may be too big for professional use. Godot is fantastic for making quick prototypes though. The editor is very quick & intuitive once you understand the core concepts. It's also a fantastic tool for creating cross-platform desktop & mobile applications, some professional apps have been designed with it.[0] [0]: https://alfredbaudisch.com/blog/gamedev/godot-engine/standalone-applications-made-with-godot-gui-softwares-tools/ https://alfredbaudisch.com/blog/gamedev/godot-engine/standal...
    • felideon 3y ago
      Nice. Yeah, I was thinking as a rapid prototyping tool. There's a big gulf between Figma and something like a Godot prototype. The former can give you high fidelity in look, but not in feel (interaction).
• bitwize 3y ago
  This might still be useful in the real world. Think movie industry, where having a mock OS for showing characters doing computer things is practically a trope in its own right. I was recently in a discussion with some fans of the movie Hackers, in which one of them asked what OS they used in the movie. My reply was to the effect of, what every movie in the 90s used, which was basically Mac OS with fake UI elements cobbled together in Macromedia Director (or Flash in later films). With film studios increasingly turning to game engines for applications like providing real-time on-set CG as a reference for a shoot, something like this may well be the modern version of that.
• larschdk 3y ago
  Related: Grey Hack is a fake OS, Network, Internet in a multiplayer game where the objective is to hack (including each other). It simulates many basic functions quite well (you can steal files, place files on other computers, install software, run commands from a command line, including imitations of many tools). You can also write your own programs.
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    When will someone go all in and release a hack game with hundreds of emulated real little servers of various operating systems and vulnerabilities?
    • aa6ll 3y ago
      Isn’t hack the box already itching this?
    • mikepurvis 3y ago
      At a certain point on the realism continuum, just get rid of the gamey parts and deliver someone a set of VM images that they have to boot up and break into. (Maybe that's actually what Hack the Box is, mentioned in the sibling— I hadn't heard of that and only looked briefly at the homepage for it.)
      • cmeacham98 3y ago
        > Maybe that's actually what Hack the Box is, mentioned in the sibling Hack the Box hosts the VM for you on their servers (and you connect to a VPN to get access), but it's effectively that. They release a box every so often (roughly monthly?) and users compete to collect the user/root flags. They also have a rotating selection of past boxes (and I think you get access to all of them if you pay them), so it's kind of like an "on demand" CTF.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      I’ve always thought it would be interesting to try something like that for a LARP. It would be fun to run in an “anything goes” type setup. Get a cheap raspberry pi and install some really old Linux kernel with plenty of well know holes. I’d worry about delineating between game-machines and real ones. It would have to be totally isolated from the real network I guess.
• FpUser 3y ago
  Very nice. I wish it would also work on mobile. The initial screen showed up but "clicking" on folders does not cause any action.
• netbioserror 3y ago
  This just makes me yearn for a UI-centric minimal compilation mode for Godot. It's such an enticing target for GPU-rendered UI, and there are even some excellent libraries and plugins out there for making components that are useful in engineering or data analysis!
  • 654wak654 3y ago
    You can disable a lot of Godot's features when building the engine from source [1]. Not sure how much you can save while keeping most of the 2d/3d components, but it should be possible. [1]: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/contributing/development/compiling/optimizing_for_size.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/contributing/developm...
  • nightowl_games 3y ago
    Pretty sure that already exists. You can choose which Godot modules you compile via the custom_modules flag. We, for example, ship a tiny wasm for our 2d Godot web games.
• barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Shouldn’t use the godot name for this
• mariya12 3y ago
  [flagged]
• cjdell 3y ago
  The Godot IDE itself is a "game" as in it is entirely built using Godot APIs. Makes me wonder if it would actually be a good environment to build portable business apps, sort of like a modern Visual Basic.
  • jeremyjh 3y ago
    It would have all the issues of Flutter (non-native widgets, accessibility, etc) without the focus on these specific kinds of use cases.
    • IshKebab 3y ago
      Only nerds care about non-native widgets.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • lolinder 3y ago
        Native widgets come with a bunch of accessibility and localization features that are typically missing from naive custom widgets. A native English speaker with normal vision might naively assume that they could reimplement a widget that's just as good as the native one in less than a week, but the result will be awful for anyone who doesn't match that description. If you're building with web tech accessibility and localization are easier to add to a custom widget (though they do still require thought), but this is Godot, not Electron.
        • nightowl_games 3y ago
          I've read comments like this for years. But without concrete examples it doesn't stick.
      • omeid2 3y ago
        And people with disabilities.
• Gormo 3y ago
  This is actually a great proof of concept for using Godot as a cross-platform framework for desktop applications. The distribution package is incredibly simple -- just a single executable and a data file -- and performance is excellent. This seems much superior to Flatpak and the like as a way to offer fully self-contained distro-agnostic binary packages, and vastly superior to Electron in the performance department. Maybe desktop applications built with game engines are the next big trend.
  • eru 3y ago
    The Firefox people have some nice write-ups about how they want to / wanted to use techniques from games to make Firefox's UI faster.
  • jadtl 3y ago
    I was trying to think of arguments against it, so I thought about the fact immediate mode GUIs might not always be suitable, before I stumbled upon this post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47444189/what-are-the-performance-implications-of-using-an-immediate-mode-gui-compared-to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47444189/what-are-the-pe... The only other downside I can think about is from a design standpoint, the application has to have the same design language across platforms, so it cannot have a native look for each. Any other cons?
    • pants2 3y ago
      I would be concerned about power efficiency / battery life considering the type of rendering it's doing. That would be cool to get some info on.
    • 654wak654 3y ago
      Some quick googling tells me Godot doesn't have native tray icons/notifications support or access to peripherals like webcams & printers. Buut if you're using Godot over electron/flutter/QT your app is probably focusing on 3D / physics topics. You can implement plugins for those other niche desktop features as you need them.
• bentt 3y ago
  Please consider calling it GodOS (pr: gud-os)
  • popcar2 3y ago
    Trust me, you aren't the first to recommend the name. I love the idea of saying godos, but then I'd have to constantly explain that it has no relation to God or TempleOS haha
    • bentt 3y ago
      I trust you
• arminiusreturns 3y ago
  Very nice! (and AGPLv3 too!!) I have been working on a similar project for actual filesystem/OS interaction (heavily abusing OS.execute (https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_os.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_os.html)) which is actually a sub-project of a much bigger project (only working part-time now so I can spend half my day on it as I near alpha). My favorite part so far has been in my attempts at using Godot to recreate fsv/fsn (3d filesystem representation). Is there any reason you haven't tried to turn it into a real desktop environment given that Godot provides the mechanisms to do so? I know I've been nervous that I might have a bug that does something destructive and that is why I've been working on my ci/cd pipeline and unit tests but am just curious. Either way, it has been awesome watching the explosion of creativity happening in Godot land. I compile daily and watch the commits and see such vast improvements being made all the time. It's a great engine with first class c++17 support with GDNative and modules, and I truly believe the future of gaming (and many other things) is FOSS. My only meta-wish is that the engine was GPL instead of MIT, but luckily that doesn't stop me from releasing my stuff built in it as GPL.
  • popcar2 3y ago
    > Is there any reason you haven't tried to turn it into a real desktop environment given that Godot provides the mechanisms to do so? It's just too complicated to embed third party applications into a Godot game. I suppose it is technically possible to do so since you can use GDExtension to glue C++ code, but I can't even begin to imagine how that can work. Thanks for the feedback anyways :) As a side note, Godot can't be GPL because it would imply that you can't make closed source games in it (they'd all have to be GPL as well).
    • arminiusreturns 3y ago
      With OS. functions (including OS.execute) you don't need any third party things or GDExtensions from my point of view. You might check it out if you haven't. I am working on a real file browser in 3d and execution launches applications natively in linux for example. It's not launched "within Godot" per se. As for the GPL thing: that's exactly the point! Wish you the best in future Godot dev.
• strontian 3y ago
  Thank you for making this! I’ve been dissatisfied with the options available for making local GUIs and curious about what could be done with game engines. What was it like working with the UI layer of Godot?
  • popcar2 3y ago
    Quite fun. I find it a lot simpler and more intuitive than other UI frameworks I've worked with (especially front-end webdev), but I understand it's very opinionated. Once you get accustomed to using Control nodes in Godot (that's what they call UI components), it becomes super easy to rapidly prototype and design anything you'd like.
• tombert 3y ago
  This is really neat! I almost wonder if this could be adapted into a “real” desktop environment, as in “competing alongside KDE or Gnome”. I have no idea what’s involved with doing that but it it would be cool if you could.
• dogtimeimmortal 3y ago
  Dang! I just realized github no longer works on my old macbook running firefox 78.15.0esr (64-bit). BigTech wants me to buy a new macbook or switch to chrome. Edit: it's actually no laughing matter. I'm pretty devastated. :-(
  • Dunedan 3y ago
    ... or to just update to a newer version of Firefox.
  • ziddoap 3y ago
    The current FireFox ESR version is 115.6.0. Extended support for 78.15 ended in 2021. It's weird that your first inclination is a new computer or chrome. Those are two very different things, and neither is necessary.
• corethree 3y ago
  I mean let's look at all the game menu screens in existence today. For what they are most of these screens are far better than HTML counterparts. UI is snappier and more special effects. Game UIs off the menu have always been better than web pages too. Look at say baldurs gate 3. I don't think such a UI is easily pulled off in web. Possible but awkward to build.
• jarboot 3y ago
  I've been thinking about making a cross-platform mobile app but don't want to think about react native, touch javascript, or fiddle with xcode any more than I have to. Is it accurate to think that I could instead use godot to create a cross-platform app to eliminate complexity from react native while creating something that is performant/native across ios/android?
  • ronyeh 3y ago
    I’ve worked in both Godot and React Native. I wouldn’t say you are eliminating any complexity.... You are just trading one UI system for another. UI by its nature is complex and requires a lot of “code”. In the Godot case you might be doing less coding in the “typing letters on a keyboard” way, but you still need to figure out the UI controls and fiddle with the settings in the properties panel until you get it juuuust right. The final product is still saved as code, in tscn scene files.
• Rucadi 3y ago
  The performance is really nice, I kinda love it.
• neonsunset 3y ago
  >written in GDScript Quite unfortunate.
  • koromak 3y ago
    Until C# is first class, I still find GDScript more comfortable
• nirav72 3y ago
  This is neat. I always wondered if it was possible or if anyone has made a fancy UI for instrumentation / dashboard using a game engine.
• freshnode 3y ago
  This reminds me of a time circa 2005 where "Sub OSes" were somewhat popular in the GameMaker community. Seems that given enough time someone will try to make an OS-like interface in a given game engine. It was a great way to understand UI and usability paradigms beyond building game mechanics. This definitely triggered some pleasant nostalgia for me.
  • trigonated 3y ago
    Nice to see someone else who also remembers those. I was the creator of Tiagix OS, AFAIK one of the first subOSes that actually had support for creating apps for it. Learned a lot about GUI toolkits making it, since I had to implement one from scratch for it.
    • arjonagelhout 3y ago
      Do you have any material online on Tiagix OS? I can't seem to find anything from a quick Google search.
      • trigonated 3y ago
        I think there's a build of an older version of it on the YoYoGames archive. The archive didn't save the screenshots that the original website had, sadly. I also spent a long time working on a very large update which I might have archived somewhere locally but never shared it online.
  • wejick 3y ago
    Also there are some in browser operating system as well, typically they have OS UI shell and applications. Unfortunately I forgot their names.
  • lmpdev 3y ago
    Yes I remember the same for The Games Factory 2/Multimedia Fusion
  • freshnode 3y ago
• chaosharmonic 3y ago
  > silksong never.png Why do you have to hurt me like this
• swalsh 3y ago
  I remember when Notch was playing with this space game with a slimed down assembly language he created. He stopped working on it unfortunately, but I still think there's a whole potential genre of hacking on a game. Not a "press F" to hack, but a legit log into this system, get/change whatever. Having a legit in-game OS seems like a good step forward.
  • japanman185 3y ago
    [dead]
  • bragr 3y ago
    It's more programming than hacking but you might enjoy TIS-100 https://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/ https://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/
  • posix86 3y ago
    Factorio has a mod where you can program electricity circuits using assembly, I forgot the name. You place a "computer facility", connect to the signal network, then open a terminal to start programming. It's pretty cool because factories can be very complex, giving it real utility. And you can communicate over the wire with fair sophistication using items as signal symbols. The clock speed of the devices was limited to a few instructions per game tick.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      At what point does it start looking too much like your real job? Zachatronics game Shenzen had that problem for some friends of mine that do chip design professionally.
  • n_plus_1_acc 3y ago
    https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/
  • koromak 3y ago
    Bitburners does a pretty good job. Its an idle game with fairly limited "OS" emulation, but the best solutions require real thought and programming knowledge. You'll be writing scripts to scan the net for open ports, automatically "hack" into them, then globally balance allocate memory between all of them according to certain parameters to make the hack the most "profitable". You'll be writing elementary socket communications, building scripts to feed analytics back to your home PC, even alogirthmic trading in a fake stock market. I had fun with it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• koromak 3y ago
  I would love a write up on design philosiphy. I'm currently learning Godot coming from web dev, and finding the distributed business logic impossible to organize. I just don't know who, what, or where business logic should be. My urge is to lift logic up to the parent of any group of interactions, and let nodes just be renderers. But I understand that is absolutely not the design philosiphy of Godot, and probably won't scale.
  • keerthiko 3y ago
    It's impossible to be sure without knowing your programming experience in general across sectors, but it sounds like you are unused to the paradigms of game programming in general, which is centered on logic executed per-frame rather than per-flow (like in business applications, which is where the concept of "business logic" comes from). The default approach in game engines is to bind data including state to an actor, then have define per actor, in a given state, how it modifies its own and other actors' data over a frame (usu. processing user input as necessary), and how it renders to the screen. This is what game engines are designed to make easy, by providing something like an "Update" and "OnDraw" virtual functions you fill in for every element in your world. Inevitably every application needs to have a few "directors" who need to take care of business that can't be isolated to an individual "actor" or per-frame state manipulation, and these are usually structured around async-awaits, callbacks, is a thread handler/dispatcher. But if you go overboard with directors, actors that operate like directors, or actor-director interactions, you're inviting trouble in game-engine-land. There are some alternate paradigms like "entity component system" and entirely callback-driven event-driven game architectures, but they tend to never exist in purity without the actor-update model.
    • mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
      Ironically, early days Java Applets had you painting things on a canvas with a similar event loop. I think Flash also operated this way. I almost think if someone were to build applications with Godot (or another engine) that you would need to mentally translate from something like React components and their data to the actor/sprite+state in an event loop model. For example a todo list in Godot might have an actor that is the checkbox with some text next to it and the state of checked/unchecked, then allow the user to click something which generates more of these actors/sprites dynamically. I think where it really becomes cumbersome with a game engine is no real organization of a scene exists without you explicitly laying out x,y pixels. There are concepts of "relative" but common application concepts of pagination, etc. would be hard to pull off in a simple way in the code I would imagine.
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  This is a pretty cool prototype for something I'd considered Godot for: a GUI for a device running embedded Linux. In that environment, you want the least bloat but some decent development tools so you can iterate reasonably fast. That's not a widely-available combo.
• mdtrooper 3y ago
  https://simulavr.com/ https://simulavr.com/ was coding a VR desktop with Godot.
• stealthcat 3y ago
  More like GodotDesktop
• Silphendio 3y ago
  Have you thought about turning this into a linux desktop environment? It wouldn't even be the first Wayland compositor using Godot.
• Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  > Note: GodotOS is not actually an operating system, it's an application with an interface resembling one. ...actually, is GodotOS any less of an operating system than early versions of Windows?
• mnorris 3y ago
  This is awesome! I'd love to boot this up and see how it runs on a Quest headset
• David_FF 3y ago
  Ha! This is really cool I'm really impressed that you were able to create this in Godot. Looks like it's all GDScript too. Nice You even tucked away a pong game in there. What do you think of Godot? I've been thinking of switching to it after I finish working on my Unity project
• MetalSnake 3y ago
  I played and finished Super Bit Boy. :D Reminded me of the game "Thomas Was Alone", that was nice. :)