[HN Gopher] Godot 4.0 Stable
___________________________________________________________________
Godot 4.0 Stable
Author : Jowsey
Score : 355 points
Date : 2023-03-01 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| MintPaw wrote:
| Release notes is a 404.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| They should probably merge the PR :)
| https://github.com/godotengine/godot-website/pull/577
| memco wrote:
| The highlight stream is over an hour away from now: perhaps the
| release is still happening now?
| simjnd wrote:
| What's the difference between the new "automatic mesh LOD" in
| Godot and Nanite in Unreal 5?
| syntheweave wrote:
| Godot is using a more traditional graphics pipeline, and
| sending mesh data to the GPU after having the CPU do initial
| calculations for LOD. Nanite is designed as a "GPU software
| renderer" and therefore performs fine-grained LOD calculations
| "during" its rasterization, within the shader code. That's
| oversimplifying the exact steps, but it explains the orders-of-
| magnitude difference between Nanite and traditional approaches
| since doing more on the GPU means there aren't as many data
| transfer bottlenecks.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| To the dead comment asking about "mono" builds, they have a .NET
| runtime so you can use C#
| pentagrama wrote:
| I usually prefer just read the release notes of software updates,
| but in this case, a video showing and explaining the new features
| is a great companion https://youtu.be/chXAjMQrcZk
| fhd2 wrote:
| Been working with Godot for a couple of months now and can highly
| recommend it. Maybe it's just the mental model that matches mine
| well, but I have to spend very little time reading things up - in
| general stuff turns out to work how I think it should, and it's
| not more complicated than it has to be. Quite different from my
| experience with Unity.
|
| I'll probably steer clear of 4.0 for now though - for my non-AAA
| needs 3.x (3.6 will receive LTS if I understood it correctly) is
| quite sufficient, and it looks like I'd have to do quite a bit of
| yak shaving to switch.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I've been looking forward to this for so long and when it finally
| comes I'm on an overnight train in Vietnam (I purposely didn't
| bring a laptop for the trip). Still, makes mo so happy to see all
| that hard work payoff, solid job from the team and all
| contributors
| et1337 wrote:
| I've been playing with this recently and it's made game
| development fun for me again. The prospect of creating an
| account, signing a bunch of EULAs, installing an Electron
| "version manager" so I can install a massive engine, hook it up
| to a massive IDE, only to have it all instantly crash just about
| extinguished any spark I had left for game development.
|
| But Godot is like a breath of fresh air. Lightweight, beautiful
| abstractions, with a lot of horsepower to back it up. It crashes
| as much as the competitors if not more, but man is it fun!
|
| Even the Godot subreddit feels like a breath of fresh air
| compared to /r/gamedev. People are just having fun.
| entelechy0 wrote:
| [dead]
| n42 wrote:
| I can't agree with you more about how demotivating Unity is to
| work with. waiting for 5 seconds every time I save a C# file
| and another 5 seconds when I press play (on a new, small
| project), rolling a d4 to see if the engine crashes, fighting
| VCS with random changes to files I haven't touched every time I
| open the editor, absolutely no clear direction about how I
| should be building if I start a project today.. I could go on
| and others already have.
|
| it's sad, because I can see what Unity could be (and what it
| used to be), and it is just not there right now.
|
| I still haven't "clicked" with Godot, but I'm eager to give v4
| a try now that it is officially released.
| [deleted]
| AbusiveHNAdmin wrote:
| [dead]
| segphault wrote:
| I tried one of the beta releases and successfully migrated a
| small toy project that I had been working on in Unity. It's
| remarkable how much Godot has improved. The new 2D tilemap editor
| in 4.0 is really good. I was also really happy to see that the
| type system in the Godot scripting language is a lot more
| comprehensive now.
|
| It's pretty remarkable how much faster and cleaner the Godot
| developer experience is compared to Unity. I feel like a spend a
| huge amount of my Unity development time waiting for the compiler
| and fighting with the tools. In Godot, the development iteration
| loop is much faster. I can't really speak to 3D capabilities, but
| for 2D projects I'm totally sold on Godot and see no reason to
| ever go back to Unity.
| bogwog wrote:
| > 4 years of development.
|
| For some perspective, console generations are usually around 6-7
| years. Given their stated AAA aspirations, I wonder what the
| future development process will actually look like, because
| another dark age like from Godot 3 to 4 would be a deal breaker.
| It's easy to say "future 4.x releases will come with a much
| faster cadence", but it's also easy to decide that something else
| absolutely needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in a multi-year
| effort.
|
| But negativity aside, finally having a stable release is great.
| Godot is a really nice engine, and definitely a huge step up from
| the existing commercial engines in terms of usability.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > another dark age like from Godot 3 to 4 would be a deal
| breaker.
|
| Sorry, but there was no "dark age". The 3.x line was being
| continually updated during the work on 4.0. the last major 3.x
| release came out only six months or so ago, in August 2022
| (3.5).
| Vespasian wrote:
| I really hope they can pull a Blender and become productive for
| small-to-medium games.
|
| It's great to see some "commercially viable" games like Dome
| Keeper being built upon Godot.
| LanceH wrote:
| It's definitely viable for 2D -- I'm 100% sure on this. The
| biggest factor holding people back is the hesitancy for a
| professional developer to leave something like Unity. That
| won't matter to the 1-2 person teams.
|
| As I have no aspirations of working professionally in games,
| I'm using Godot. If I did have such, I would probably be in
| Unity or Unreal just for the opportunities. As of right
| now...today.
| Macha wrote:
| Unreal:
|
| UE1: 1998 (some had access in 1996)
|
| UE2: 2002 (announced 1998)
|
| UE3: 2006 (announced 2004)
|
| UE4: 2014 (announced to be in development in 2005, imminent in
| 2012)
|
| UE5: 2022 (announced 2020)
|
| The development cycles of Godot seems pretty comparable to the
| competition? The only difference is that by being an open
| source project, people can see the new engine is being worked
| on before a marketing department for a commercial engine would
| reveal it.
| bogwog wrote:
| It's not about version numbers. I wasn't a UE3 licensee, but
| I'd imagine that came with decent support and the release of
| features to keep pace with the industry at the time. Godot
| obviously can't be expected to provide Epic Games-level
| support, but the main development efforts from the OSS team
| was split since they were (understandably) focused on Godot
| 4. So all of the improvements/changes in 4 were completely
| useless to most users during that time, who were
| realistically only going to be able to use 3.5.
|
| There was no hint of a release date, a roadmap, or anything
| like that. It felt like Godot 4 was going to be stuck in
| development hell forever, meanwhile people trying to actually
| build a game would be stuck on the increasingly obsolete and
| divergent 3.5 (unless you were willing/able to maintain an
| incomplete engine during development). So that was
| essentially 4 years of nothing to most people (tbf 3.5 did
| continue to get bug fixes during that time).
|
| I say this not to trash on the Godot team's work, but rather
| to say that I think they should focus less on improving the
| engine for the sake of it, and more on work that seeks to
| increase the direct value it provides to users (which
| includes potential customers of W4 Games).
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > It felt like Godot 4 was going to be stuck in development
| hell forever, meanwhile people trying to actually build a
| game would be stuck on the increasingly obsolete and
| divergent 3.5 (unless you were willing/able to maintain an
| incomplete engine during development). So that was
| essentially 4 years of nothing to most people (tbf 3.5 did
| continue to get bug fixes during that time).
|
| ???
|
| What are you talking about, the 3.x branch was being worked
| on and had new releases during most of that time.
|
| 3.5 itself only came out in August 2022, so between that
| and 4.0 was a massive...six months or so? Why is waiting
| six months a problem?
| runevault wrote:
| Keep in mind they were still updating 3.x that entire time. The
| 3.x line made it all the way up to 3.5 with significant
| improvements even as 4.0 was being worked on for those 4 years.
| Considering it is an open source project with very few people
| paid to work on it, keeping both going over that time is kind
| of impressive.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Some of those improvements came directly from the 4.0 work.
| sfteus wrote:
| Also worth noting that many of those improvements were
| originally made only for 4.x, but some of the contributors
| backported them back to 3.x. It wasn't like 3.x only got
| minor updates while the majority of focus was on 4.x.
| norman784 wrote:
| I don't follow Godot too close, but wasn't the big change also
| from 3.x to 4.x also migration from OpenGL to Vulkan? That's a
| rewrite of the rendering engine, which is a big part of a game
| engine, that most likely also affect a lot of other aspects of
| the engine.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Godot is one of those pinnacle FOSS projects that just totally
| impresses me, especially given the state its in _now_ , with 4.0.
| It's so cool that a loose community of "The People" have created
| things like Godot, OBS, and Blender. What a time to be alive.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Godot is one of those pinnacle FOSS projects that just
| totally impresses me, especially given the state its in now,
| with 4.0.
|
| It is definitely one of the success stories, at least so far.
|
| For example, there are projects like jMonkeyEngine (a game
| engine in Java, on top of LWJGL) that don't get as much
| attention and their movement forwards is way slower:
| https://jmonkeyengine.org/
|
| There's also Stride 3D, which is a bit closer to Unity I'd say,
| which is still a really nice project, but is also limited in
| how much development can be done: https://www.stride3d.net/
|
| Regardless, I wish all of those projects success and would
| still be glad if Godot could be one of the champions of open
| source game engines, perhaps as a viable and easy to use
| alternative to something like Unity for those who want that
| sort of thing, even in the professional development space
| eventually!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| OBS is amazing...except for the complete lack of 'undo'
| support. Just feels so bizarre to be missing such a basic UI
| feature.
| goffi wrote:
| Congrats to all the people involved, it's really great to see
| such a FOSS tool!
|
| How is it for app development? I've seen that they have started
| to showreels for apps
| (https://godotengine.org/article/announcing-godot-2022-showre...)
| and it's quite impressive. I'm wondering if it can be a good
| alternative to stuff like Qt/Qt Quick for rapid prototyping, or
| even production app.
|
| The easy export to multiple platforms is a really an interesting
| point. I'm mostly wondering if it can handle correctly stuff like
| accessibility, desktop integration, and if it's good at handling
| texts (Unicode, RTL, etc).
| WillAdams wrote:
| It was used for:
|
| https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor
|
| which I've been using quite successfully.
| AbusiveHNAdmin wrote:
| [dead]
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| Any recommended tutorials? Preferably text/books over videos
| runevault wrote:
| With 4.x JUST getting out books aren't going to be ready for a
| bit. There are major changes on all levels, from the new
| renderer to a significant update to their language GDScript to
| how you do some things in the UI to node type name changes.
|
| If you wanna learn the very basics they have a tutorial on
| their site for 2d and 3d. Looks like Stable actually now points
| to the 4.0 version[1] I did the new 2d one and at that point
| (beta 1 I think?) they still had outdated information but I
| believe all of it has been fixed.
|
| [1] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/
| milliams wrote:
| The release announcement blog post with all the information is at
| https://godotengine.org/article/godot-4-0-sets-sail/.
|
| It might make more sense to use that link instead.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I've been using Godot 3 for 2+ years. It's great. There's some
| downsides to Godot for sure, but I think they will all be
| resolved over time.
|
| I could work on Godot for the rest of my life. It brings me great
| joy to contribute to the engine. I would never feel comfortable
| writing Unity code again, as I do not want any other commercial
| interests injected into my artwork, my hobbies and my craft.
|
| Godot is truly a public good.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Do you use GDScript or C#? Just curious, I feel like most
| developers just use GDScript as opposed to C# but I'm not sure
| how wrong I am on that.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| I think most do use GDScript, but the C# support is very
| good. If you need great performance in your game scripts, or
| are familiar with C#, best to start with that.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| GDScript for UI and prototyping, c++ for the game logic when
| its needed or when the game design is stable and we have time
| to rewrite it. I want to write a GDScript -> C++ transpiler,
| to be honest.
|
| I wouldnt want to use c# as I dont want the complexity. Our
| games go on the web, as well, and I don't think c# works
| there.
|
| godot-Nim is an attractive project, as well.
| thsbrown wrote:
| I have been using Unity a long time and in general appreciate
| it, despite it's many many quirks and rough edges.
|
| That said I'm extremely excited to see an open source
| alternative that looks to have a very active community around
| it and that looks to be doing great things!
|
| If blender has taught me anything, it's that having a fantastic
| free and open source tool in a sea of commercial offerings
| benefits everyone.
|
| The paid offerings are forced to up their game, the consumer
| benefits with more competitive pricing and those that can't
| afford to buy tools have a great product at their disposal in
| which to learn and create.
| [deleted]
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I used Unity for a long time and I appreciate it as well.
| Last couple years I havent liked the direction that unity is
| going. The docs and usability have regressed imo.
| shdon wrote:
| Having looked at the migration guide from 3.x to 4.x, I am rather
| worried at the large amount of stuff that needs to be changed to
| port projects from 3.x to 4.x. There's an automated conversion
| tool for parts of it, but there's so much that it doesn't handle.
|
| My enthusiasm waned quite quickly when I read that. The huge
| amount of breaking changes means that few projects or tutorials
| are likely to get updated and adoption of this new version is
| likely to be much slower as it's like having to build the
| ecosystem up from scratch.
|
| As I'm about to start my first larger Godot project, I was
| initially waiting for 4 so I could work in that (and looking
| forward to it), now I'm going to have to seriously consider
| staying on 3.x if I want to get a good start.
|
| Definitely not the case that you can just take a 3.x project,
| load it into 4.0, spend a few minutes fixing some bugs or
| deprecation warnings and then enjoy new features or performance
| enhancements.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I really don't understand this mindset. Just start.
|
| > My enthusiasm waned quite quickly
|
| > As I'm about to start
|
| You sure your not just looking for external reasons to justify
| procrastinating?
| shdon wrote:
| Wow, judgemental much? "Just start" is a recipe for disaster
| in a siatuation like this, and I'd rather not set myself up
| for failure.
|
| My enthusiasm about this particular version, that I had been
| looking forward to, waned quickly. I'm about to start the new
| project after I finish up my previous one, and I'm currently
| waiting on getting the design document. I'm doing the
| opposite of procrastinating, I want the project to be done
| smoothly and in a reasonable timeframe. Having to contend
| with conflicting information where almost everything I look
| up will be for 3.x and not applicable to the 4.x series is
| the antithesis of smoothly.
|
| So it seems now that my choices are to go with Godot 3.x and
| end up with maintenance trouble in the future and not being
| able to make use of 4's much improved feature set, go with
| Godot 4 and have a much rougher development experience, or go
| with another engine altogether.
| sli wrote:
| I've been using Godot 4 exclusively since around Beta 8 and
| have had little to no trouble adapting. Godot 4 has had
| documentation for a while now, and finding the "new"
| version of whatever I needed was always pretty easy. That's
| only going to get better.
|
| There is also of course the Godot 4 channel in the Godot
| Discord that is helpful.
| shdon wrote:
| That at least gives me hope that the ecosystem will adapt
| quickly. And I noticed GodotSteam for instance delivered
| a 4.0 compatible release today already:
| https://github.com/Gramps/GodotSteam/releases
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Do you actually need to port? It's not like 3.x suddenly
| stopped working.
|
| It's not like older games are porting to new versions of
| engines either.
| shdon wrote:
| For my older, smaller projects, nope.
|
| For a few projects I'm involved in that are currently in
| development, I had anticipated porting because of the bugs in
| 3.x that we were having to work around which are now
| hopefully solved, though now I'm reconsidering that and it
| may be better to stick with 3.x just to get the game out of
| the door.
|
| For new projects, it's a toss-up. Until a lot more resources
| (documentation, tutorials, plugins/extensions) make the shift
| to 4, it might be wiser to start even completely new projects
| in 3.x. But the improvements and fixes in 4 are enticing, so
| if the official Godot documentation is sufficient
| (admittedly, the official docs are quite well written, and
| usually it's more of a case of finding stuff than it not
| existing) and there's no need for extensions that don't exist
| for 4 yet, then doing with 4 might be a the more future-proof
| choice.
| Hamcha wrote:
| 2.x to 3.x was like that too, I basically had to start over.
|
| If you're starting a new project (like I am) I think 4.0 is the
| only choice. 3.x has awful 3D and even worse presets, GDScript
| can only be used realistically without the static typing
| features since they break all the time (for 4.0 they rewrote
| the whole thing just so they could fix static typing). C#
| really feels like something that was bolted on even years
| later.
|
| It's not hard to see why 4.0 is such a breaking upgrade, many
| of 3.x problems aren't surface level, since those were ironed
| out long ago.
| ralusek wrote:
| > As I'm about to start my first larger Godot project, I was
| initially waiting
|
| You were waiting for Godot?
| shdon wrote:
| Lol, in a sense. At least now he actually arrived.
|
| Seriously though, mostly waiting on getting the design
| document and was hoping for Godot 4 to be the clear way
| forward. I've only done smaller projects with 3.x and lots of
| experimentation and preparation for these larger projects, so
| it is a bit disappointing to see that all rendered useless by
| the sheer amount of breaking changes unless I decide to stick
| with a now outdated engine.
| EntrePrescott wrote:
| Anyone have experience with IK and skeletal animation of rigged
| 3D models on Godot 4? Last time I checked (back in the 3.x days),
| it seemed like Godot 3.x was lacking in that area (as opposed to
| 2D animation) but that they planned to improve 3D animation in
| Godot 4. I'd be interested to know how viable it now is in Godot
| 4 compared to other engines.
| raajg wrote:
| Been using the RC build over Godot 3 and have been pleasantly
| surprised. There are several quality of life improvements - the
| biggest one being that you can set default font and just change
| font sizes without having to create a new theme for reach node -
| this is probably my most used new feature!!
|
| Wonderful job Godot team, and huge congrats on the 4.0 release
| owlbynight wrote:
| I'm 41 and just getting into game development. I've been kind of
| weighing my options for awhile, and waiting for Godot 4 to come
| out. This is rad.
|
| The only complaint I have is that the scale of the GUI is
| ridiculous. It's not like I'm running some crazy resolution. Why
| is it so small? Why hasn't it been complained into options to
| scale it? I literally cannot read the project creation interface
| without using Windows zoom.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Editor -> Editor Settings -> interface -> Display Scale
| owlbynight wrote:
| Oh, thank you for that. I missed those settings completely -
| mostly because I couldn't read them haha.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm also 41, and would have the same feedback if I steeled
| myself to learning something new like game development.
| These keen-eyed kids and their crazy resolutions!
| ralusek wrote:
| Unpopular Opinion: Godot should make JavaScript/Typescript its
| scripting languages.
| krapp wrote:
| https://github.com/Geequlim/ECMAScript
|
| Also once people start using GDExtension it should be easy to
| import languages to 4.x without recompiling.
| cardanome wrote:
| GDScript is absolutely delightful, just give it a go.
|
| People are always skeptical about it because they fear it is
| another thing to learn but it is very tailor made for Godot and
| for that reason you will pick it up in no time.
|
| If you have worked with any scripting language, you will feel
| right at home. JS/TS would be a worse experience because that
| language is not designed for Godot.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I tried it and eventually gave up and ported everything I was
| working on to C#. Not enough static typing and similar for me
| in GDScript, I like structure.
|
| I know 4.0 is a bit better for that, though I'm not sure how
| much better.
| cardanome wrote:
| GDScript has decent gradual typing support these days.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I tried the static typing support in 3.x and it just
| wasn't nearly good enough. I really need being able to do
| shit like Array<Dictionary<Thing, OtherThing>>. And I
| want the static typing enforced automatically onto me,
| with compilation errors when I screw it up, not something
| I have to remember to label. Even with C#, there are
| still blank spots for this unfortunately, where the Godot
| standard library just passes you an untyped Array.
|
| I know 4.0 has improvements here for GDScript, which is
| good to hear, but I'm quite comfortable in C#, coming
| from a background as a Java/Android dev.
| Kiro wrote:
| What features does GDScript have that makes it fit Godot?
| I've been skeptical for the reason you mentioned but your
| comment might have convinced me that it's actually worth it.
| danbolt wrote:
| I was in the camp formerly of "just use Lua/C#/JS/etc." for
| Godot as I didn't want them to reinvent the wheel. I've
| changed my mind on the matter after using it though. Or,
| through having a custom implementation, they've integrated
| it very tightly with Godot's node/refcounting memory model.
| Much in the same way UE's Blueprint execution feels similar
| to C++ logic, manipulating nodes and sending signals in
| GDScript ends up having a similar flow to something done
| lower-level in the engine.
|
| I think it makes a tighter experience, and less maintenance
| work is done for bindings and transferring data to/from a
| separate heap/runtime for scripting.
| syntheweave wrote:
| GDScript is purpose-made for the task of being aware of how
| the engine wants to bind data. That is, its type system
| knows what the different components are, the events they
| can send, types of assets, etc. That makes it much smoother
| in terms of IDE support than using a general-purpose
| language - it helps you along with stuff like cueing an
| animation or audio event.
|
| It's not really a language meant for lots of computation,
| but that isn't actually what most gameplay code needs:
| games are generally doing something based on a lookup
| table, finite state machine, or collisions. It only becomes
| a deep issue if you've got a lot of custom simulation going
| on.
| themerone wrote:
| The only advantage would be the jit performance of js engines.
|
| If that is a factor you should be using C# or gdnative C++.
| phn wrote:
| Can you elaborate on why you think that?
|
| IMO, their scripting language is pretty accessible to anyone
| with a bit of experience with programming and has nice
| syntactic sugar to integrate with the engine.
| ralusek wrote:
| Ubiquity, and people love TypeScript.
| dang wrote:
| Related (about this release--there are too many Godot threads to
| list):
|
| _What 's new in C# for Godot 4.0_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34944340 - Feb 2023 (105
| comments)
|
| _Godot 4.0 RC 2_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805594
| - Feb 2023 (8 comments)
|
| _Godot 4 Release Candidate 1_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709249 - Feb 2023 (27
| comments)
|
| _Godot 4.0 beta 16: Initial .NET 7 support_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547637 - Jan 2023 (33
| comments)
|
| _Godot 4.0 beta 9 Released_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34052510 - Dec 2022 (15
| comments)
|
| _Godot Engine Release Management: 4.0 and beyond_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33793281 - Nov 2022 (43
| comments)
|
| _Movie Maker mode in Godot 4.0_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33598256 - Nov 2022 (8
| comments)
|
| _Godot 4 Beta 1_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32856034
| - Sept 2022 (110 comments)
|
| _Godot 4.0 will discontinue visual scripting_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571893 - Aug 2022 (110
| comments)
|
| _Godot 4.0 development enters feature freeze ahead of the first
| beta_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265429 - July 2022
| (118 comments)
|
| _Fog Volumes arrive in Godot 4.0_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32003065 - July 2022 (44
| comments)
| norwalkbear wrote:
| If someone builds a unity to Godot converter, I'd switch in a
| heartbeat.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| That sounds like it would probably take more dev effort just
| for the converter than for the rest of Godot, given how
| complicated (and sometimes broken) Unity is.
| amelius wrote:
| I'm betting we will see StableDiffusion models that can create 3D
| graphics assets, and basically everyone can create a game (no
| artists or programmers required).
| seanw444 wrote:
| Maybe for some more abstract games. But we'll need a while
| longer before we see something capable of making a really good
| 3D human character model with accurate proportions and details.
| Realistic guns are another thing that's hard to get the details
| right on. But yeah, hopefully we get something like that soon.
| I personally enjoy programming games, but despise the assets
| side of it, and have no friends that could assist in that
| department.
| n42 wrote:
| it's seriously demotivating as a programmer with gamedev
| dreams to be incapable of shaping something visually to an
| approximation of your vision. I'd say it's my biggest hurdle
| every time I try to jump back into gamedev.
|
| being able to draft a rigged and animated model with
| something like SD would remove a significant motivational
| roadblock for me. I don't care if it looks like unpublishable
| shit, as long as it looks like unpublishable shit that
| roughly approximates my vision. I can then continue on with
| my game design, with a self-motivating feedback loop, and
| find an artist once I can better communicate and sell them on
| the vision. it'd be phenomenal for proof of concepts and
| gamejams to see if your idea works. especially when you have
| no friends in the field.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Everyone can already create a game. There are tons of free and
| paid assets, along with mature no-code game development tools.
|
| And I've heard from folks at established studios that they've
| been playing around with generative pipelines for asset
| creation.
|
| But from my perspective, for the vast majority of games,
| programming and asset creation isn't what determines a
| successful or enjoyable game.
|
| It's a mixture of core game mechanics, style, juice, developer
| follow-through, marketing, random chance, and whether or not
| it's "fun".
| birracerveza wrote:
| Amazing engine that just keeps getting better and better.
|
| Congratulations on the release!
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| I really tried to like Godot, using it to make a node-based logic
| editor. But GDScript is incredibly bad at handling data, as well
| as having terrible editor support (and the built in editor is
| bad), which made things incredibly difficult. It doesn't even
| have first class functions or support for doing multiple HTTP
| requests at once to a single endpoint if you don't make multiple
| callback functions, one for each request. And the signals system,
| allegedly meant to reduce spaghetti, only increased it. The
| inability to put multiple scripts on a object and use of
| inheritance over composition only made things worse.
|
| I tried the Rust integration but the API was very rough around
| the edges and there was huge amounts of unsafe where I really
| wasn't sure how I was meant to verify its usage.
|
| In the end I switched to Bevy+egui. Progress is good, typing is
| strong, and while some things are more difficult, I'm not tearing
| my hair out about basic things.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| Anecdotal but most people I've ran into that are writing non-
| trivial Godot apps are using C# for these reasons.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| > 1,500 individual contributors across engine and docs.
|
| I feel like this is an outstanding achievement. I've never
| contributed to Godot, but somebody must be doing something right
| and making people feel welcome. I may have to check it out.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Akien does a great job managing the PRs. They have a decent
| system to enable them to review quickly and the core team does
| a ton of code reviews. Once you start contributing to Godot,
| it's pretty addicting.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| >They have a decent system to enable them to review quickly
| and the core team does a ton of code reviews.
|
| Are there other open source projects like this? My biggest
| blocker from contributing to open source have always been the
| slow to never happening code reviews.
| raincole wrote:
| A hyporthetical question: if you're going to contribute to an
| open source game engine, which one would it be and why? Godot?
| Bevy? Others?
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| How have people found the learning curve and debugging? My son
| did a game with it, but once we started trying custom stuff it
| wasn't clear where the code for some things was - some things
| were in the scene some in the shapes etc. I.e. it's crazy easy to
| start with but gets a lot harder as you go?
| prox wrote:
| That's mostly on the way you plan structure your code. But also
| inherent in programming. Make sure you comment your code and
| keep certain planning central or near to your files.
| Vespasian wrote:
| For people with programming experience I found it to be
| reasonably fast to pick up. In some areas it's quite low level
| but "generally" has a good documentation.
|
| Especially version 4.0 introduced some compatability breaking
| quality of life changes.
|
| For beginners Godot is not as intuitive as other engines (e.g.
| Unreal with it's visual blueprints)
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, they phased out visual scripting in 3.x because it was
| too low-level, but I do hope it will come back in a 4.x with
| a higher degree of abstraction because for folk with no
| coding expertise and for simple object scripts, Blueprints
| are just way easier (and so was Bolt on Unity, which my kids
| used with great success until I got them to shift to Godot
| 3.x and learn GDScript).
| flavelius wrote:
| I have the same experience, it's very easy to get started but
| gets more complicated and especially buggy the more of the not-
| widely-used features you begin to use or the larger the project
| becomes, unfortunately. But many of those issues are constantly
| being addressed and iterated on, so i'm quite positive about
| godot's future.
| syntheweave wrote:
| That aspect of not being sure how your assets should line up is
| a general "game engines are complicated" problem, which occurs
| as soon as you add this kind of flexibility: suddenly there's
| just a lot more dependency behavior to be aware of as you set
| up your data and a lot of code bugs become data bugs.
|
| Godot is relatively consistent in what it wants and how it
| parses a scenegraph, but it's still a little bit quirky: it
| usually behaves best if you break out any dynamic elements into
| different scenes so that their instancing is fully
| encapsulated, and for things that need to change state, add
| on/off toggles but keep it statically instanced. Attaching
| stuff after the scene has been instanced tends to bring it out
| of sync with the state of the collision/physics servers.
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