[HN Gopher] Godot 4 Release Candidate 1
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Godot 4 Release Candidate 1
Author : kagbor
Score : 142 points
Date : 2023-02-08 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (godotengine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (godotengine.org)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| loufe wrote:
| 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.
| cmdrk wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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-...
|
| Has pretty pictures and everything too.
| imtringued wrote:
| 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.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| [dead]
| milliams wrote:
| 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
| [2] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/66231
| iFire wrote:
| Faolan-Rad and I (fire) are working in that area
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > 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
|
| I'd be careful with this and make sure that if you do try a
| switch, you'd keep the existing tech alive. I've worked on a
| bunch of game projects in different companies and in pretty
| much every single one of them, both custom and external
| engines, people wanted to use something else.
|
| One of my favorite jokes was that the biggest feature UE brings
| is that you get to blame Tim Sweeney when something goes wrong
| instead of the engine CTO :-P.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I used Godot 2 a few years back to make a demo of an
| (interactive, non-videogame) system when interning for a
| government contractor.
|
| They loved the demo, but management felt uneasy about moving
| forward with an open-source engine with no support guarantees.
|
| So they decided to go with a proprietary commercial game engine
| with a license compatible with our work.
|
| All I know now is that proprietary engine is dead now and Godot
| isn't.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| 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.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| On a scale of 1 (Inkscape vs. Illustrator) to 10 (Blender vs.
| Cinema4D), where would people say Godot vs. Unity is right now?
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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]
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Just going to point out that Unity games last year generated
| over several billions in revenue (largely on the strength of
| Genshin Impact), and at this point in its lifecycle Unity games
| were already generating several hundred million in revenue
| across multiple platforms.
|
| Godot games collectively have generated a few million in its
| entire lifespan, and most of that was the Sonic Colors re-
| release.
|
| Godot is great if you want an open-source game engine for a
| hobby project. It's not so great if you want a commercial game
| engine for a game you intend to actually release (the one major
| commercially released game using Godot was a buggy mess). So in
| that respect, it's like Gimp vs Photoshop (or Affinity), it's a
| 5: you choose Godot for ideological reasons but not for
| technological or business reasons.
|
| If you want 2D games, go with GameMaker. If you want 3D games,
| go with Unity for mobile or Unreal for console, or either for
| PC.
| kramerger wrote:
| A solid 7.
|
| Maybe a 8 if you don't care about console support and mostly do
| 2d games.
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| Im sorry, but in what world is Godot not an 11 compared to
| Unity for "2D games && !consoles"?
| bodge5000 wrote:
| 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.
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