[HN Gopher] Godot 4.1
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Godot 4.1
        
       Author : freeCandy
       Score  : 460 points
       Date   : 2023-07-06 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (godotengine.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (godotengine.org)
        
       | BaculumMeumEst wrote:
       | i have seen a lot of folks talk about switching to godot due to
       | unity "selling out". but if godot gets popular enough, money will
       | be waved in the maintainers' faces, and it will follow the same
       | trajectory.
       | 
       | meanwhile, there are alternatives like love2d, which is a more
       | straightforward game engine written in c++ built on popular open
       | source libs like sdl2 with a extended with lua(jit). it's
       | lightweight enough that you could probably maintain it yourself.
        
         | TulliusCicero wrote:
         | > love2d
         | 
         | Oh god, it uses lua.
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | > but if godot gets popular enough, money will be waved in the
         | maintainers' faces, and it will follow the same trajectory.
         | 
         | Yeah just like when Blender got popular, the developers sold it
         | out and now it's a shitty piece of software.
         | 
         | Haha, just kidding. The above never happened and Blender is
         | still getting better every month.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | Don't get me wrong, I like LuaJIT and SDL2 but Godot is open
         | source. There's no danger of it "following the same trajectory"
         | as Unity.
        
         | allan_s wrote:
         | with regards to love2d, they are no on the same "market" (I
         | have made hobbyist game in both)
         | 
         | love2d is really the most minimalist things you can call a game
         | engine, i.e quickly you have to resort to 3rd party library ,
         | even for something as simple as 2d collision or the ECS system.
         | If you know perfectly what you are doing it's probably better.
         | 
         | Godot is much more battery include so for an experienced
         | programmer it may feel too opinionated.
         | 
         | my own experience was that, while I'm a web developer for 10+
         | years, I'm really new at game development, and love2d was easy
         | at first but soon a pain because I hit a ceiling glass of "my
         | game has become too complex and I don't know the design pattern
         | of game developement". At the opposite Godot was a pain at
         | first, especially as a Vim user, i.e why do I have to use this
         | GUI, but once I got used with the tool by following some step
         | by step tutorial, I felt like sky was the limit.
        
         | Macha wrote:
         | There are four differences between Godot today and Unity circa
         | 2007 that make this unlikely:
         | 
         | 1. The Godot trademark is owned by the Software Freedom
         | Conservancy, and not the original authors or their company.
         | 
         | 2. The founders do have a consulting/support company, W4Games,
         | but it is not Godot Inc, and because of point 1, can never be.
         | Secondly, it is not afforded any special place in the project
         | leadership structure. W4Games employees account for 2 of 9
         | leadership positions in the Godot project leadership. This is
         | overseen by the SFC who would not permit a company to have too
         | many seats.
         | 
         | 3. The founder's company also does not have overwhelming
         | control of contributors. Of the top 10 contributors, numbers 1,
         | 2, and 7 are part of W4 Games inc, but all of the top ten have
         | significant contributions.
         | 
         | 4. It's open source. This is less of a deterrent than the
         | above, since it's MIT licensed so someone could make a closed
         | source fork, but they would have to compete with the community
         | in that case.
        
         | bowsamic wrote:
         | Actually the reason that most people don't like Unity is
         | because the goal of the company seems to be to create a million
         | half-baked, fancy-looking ideas rather than creating a solid
         | experience with the core engine. Even today there are still
         | very weird and difficult to circumvent bugs that come up in
         | almost every project, even in trivial ones. Also, the last time
         | I used it all of the old forum threads had been partially
         | corrupted.
        
       | Capricorn2481 wrote:
       | Is there a use care for Godot for cross platform app development
       | instead of something like Electron?
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | Material Maker: https://www.materialmaker.org
         | 
         | I tried this when Substance was aquired by Adobe. Surprisingly
         | I found it much easier and enjoyable to use. Substance Designer
         | feels very clumsy.
         | 
         | Of course Substance Designer has one unique feature, which is
         | it's integration with Substance Painter. MM has some manual
         | painting capabilities, but it's not a full-fledged painting
         | app.
        
         | keyle wrote:
         | Yeah some people use Godot as a GUI framework
        
           | gcr wrote:
           | Expanding on this, Godot has its own 2D widget framework
           | that's fairly straightforward to use, though it doesn't use
           | native widgets.
           | 
           | Note that the Godot editor itself is written in the widget
           | framework, so you can get a sense for how well it works just
           | by opening Godot and clicking around.
        
             | numlock86 wrote:
             | The 2D framework, especially for UI, is pretty awesome. But
             | the learning curve on the layout system is quite sprinkled
             | with head scratching and frustration in my opinion.
        
               | nightowl_games wrote:
               | Yeah it's brutal. I've been using Godot professionally
               | for years. I have effectively mastered the layout system
               | but it was annoying to learn. It tries to be like Unity's
               | system but they made a few mistakes with Pivot, Grow
               | Direction and Size Flags imo.
               | 
               | I made a tool to position nodes in a way modelled after
               | Cocos2D, with a position, pivot and anchor point.
               | 
               | I've made a series of small tools to help me lay stuff
               | out.
               | 
               | One really good thing about Godot Ui is the "StyleBox"
               | which simply allows coders to make rounded rectangles,
               | which are so frequently used in UI it's nice to not need
               | an artist to make a .png
        
               | samstave wrote:
               | As someone who has never made a game, I really want to
               | make a tower defense game that fixes shortcomings I find
               | in others - where would one complete beginner delve into
               | Godot to accomplish starting to learn the system - there
               | are a number of tuts on YT - one of which is ~11 hours
               | long.
               | 
               | Can you make some suggestions to avoid/pre-empt any said
               | headscratchings and frustrations?
        
               | nightowl_games wrote:
               | You are going to scratch your head and be frustrated.
               | Just keep going! Imagine your asking "I want to make a
               | rock song that is better than the other rock songs. What
               | youtube video can I watch to learn how to play the
               | guitar?"
               | 
               | I usually recommend GDQuest on YouTube. Just start! Keep
               | going! You'll figure it out.
        
         | philipov wrote:
         | Is the Godot IDE itself built in Godot?
        
           | nkrisc wrote:
           | It is, and also means extending the editor experience is
           | easy, even using GDScript.
        
           | leetrout wrote:
           | Yep
        
         | weinzierl wrote:
         | I've heard the Tesla mobile app is made with Godot. Not sure if
         | it is true.
        
           | barnabask wrote:
           | It was true a year ago:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32358271
        
         | WillAdams wrote:
         | Yes.
         | 
         | OpenSCAD Graph Editor is done with an earlier version and runs
         | on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux:
         | 
         | https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor
        
         | pachorizons wrote:
         | Yes, although the first-generation of apps are only just
         | beginning to emerge. Here are a couple of fully-featured
         | projects on Github:
         | 
         | Pixel art editor: https://github.com/Orama-
         | Interactive/Pixelorama
         | 
         | Infinite canvas drawing tool: https://github.com/mbrlabs/Lorien
         | 
         | Trello-style kanban board:
         | https://github.com/alfredbaudisch/Godello
         | 
         | Narrative designer for games: https://github.com/mhgolkar/Arrow
        
           | freeCandy wrote:
           | Some more listed here:
           | https://github.com/godotengine/awesome-godot#projects
        
       | hamoid wrote:
       | I haven't seen people mentioning using Godot with Kotlin, so I'll
       | leave the link here. At some point it could be nice for Kotlin
       | devs.
       | 
       | https://godot-kotl.in/en/stable/
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | Until godot devs don't forget the "-static-libgcc -static-
       | libstdc++" compile/link options, should be fine, that linking
       | with the oldest set of glibc libs as possible (I saw games
       | carefully using the glibc from debian ubuntu 12.04).
       | 
       | I guess godot has proper vulkan->GL fallback.
       | 
       | What's now really missing is from sourceware binutils: fine
       | grained control of the versions of the symbols to use while
       | creating binaries. And then, robust game binaries would be much
       | easier to produce: it would let the devs use the latest elf/linux
       | distro and still produce compatible binaries with old elf/linux
       | distros (easy planned obsolescence workaround) avoid the current
       | massive mess (build an old glibc, and reconfigure the toolchain
       | to use it for linking, PAIN).
        
         | elFarto wrote:
         | > What's now really missing is from sourceware binutils: fine
         | grained control of the versions of the symbols to use while
         | creating binaries.
         | 
         | I did actually prototype an idea for attempting to fix this.
         | The tool would take a list of symbols from a text file and
         | produce a (non-functioning) .so file that ld can link against.
         | The newly created .so file can be injected in via an
         | environment variable (LIBRARY_PATH iirc).
         | 
         | Since the list of symbols is just text, it's easily modified to
         | contain only the one's that you want to target.
         | 
         | It's not a complicated tool to write, but there are some issues
         | like how to reliably get ld to pick the correct .so file when
         | you're overriding an existing on, LIBRARY_PATH is not 100%
         | reliable. The other issue was if it's nessassary to recreate
         | all the symbol types (like weak, etc..) exactly, I'm not sure
         | exactly what's required for ld.
        
           | sylware wrote:
           | The text file would map simply a symbol to a version, to be
           | overridden in the generated ELF binary (exe or SO).
           | 
           | That way, the game devs don't need to build the "old" SOs and
           | reconfigure the toolchain to use them, which is unreasonable
           | to ask them (but this is expected from game engine elf/linux
           | devs like unity/unreal/godot/etc) and a MASSIVE PAIN to make
           | work properly (exponentially proportional on the abstraction
           | level of the game/engine build system).
           | 
           | While any "old" symbol version is not removed...
        
       | gardaani wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | pachorizons wrote:
         | Less than two minutes into Godot's own documentation:
         | https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/expo...
         | 
         | https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/expo...
        
         | gcr wrote:
         | This is disproven with a quick google search ...
         | 
         | You can export Android and iOS build files right from the
         | editor, people have published successful Godot apps to both app
         | stores ...
         | 
         | https://itch.io/games/made-with-godot/platform-ios lists a
         | bunch of games, many of which are available on the Play Store
         | as well ...
        
           | mariusseufzer wrote:
           | I shipped Discounter Strike to the AppStore last week. Built
           | with Godot 4! https://apps.apple.com/de/app/discounter-
           | strike/id1661324544...
        
             | victorbjorklund wrote:
             | Well done. Just tried it. Perfect causual game and even if
             | I recognize the game play (not a bad thing) it was actually
             | more fun hitting shoppers with my cart!
        
         | BitPirate wrote:
         | Godot has support for both of them?
        
         | hakube wrote:
         | I'm sure no one cares about the platforms/tools you use
        
         | neuspadrin wrote:
         | I'm going to guess they set a requirement of C#/.NET to help
         | their move from Unity, which currently isn't supported for iOS
         | and Android as of right now.
         | 
         | "As of Godot 4.0, exporting .NET projects is supported for
         | desktop platforms (Linux, Windows and macOS). Other platforms
         | will gain support in future 4.x releases."
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | robertlagrant wrote:
       | This is what I've been waiting for! - Samuel Beckett.
        
       | kirillbobyrev wrote:
       | Godot is just AWESOME, I am very impressed with the progress the
       | team makes and the overall direction of the project.
       | 
       | I was always excited about Game Dev (even started learning
       | Computer Science and became a Software Engineer largely because I
       | wanted to make games), dreamed of making my own small games but
       | never really got to it. After I became a full-time Software
       | Engineer, I never really found time or the right tools for making
       | my own small games for fun. I recently discovered Bevy and gave
       | it a try. ECS is a nice concept, but Bevy is more of a library
       | and it's quite hard to make full-featured games using it (just
       | like using SDL/something similar).
       | 
       | When I discovered Godot and gave it a try, I was so impressed:
       | it's really nice for beginners, yet performant enough and has
       | amazing community. This is exactly what I wanted to find, so I'm
       | incredibly happy it exists and am very excited about the future
       | development of Godot.
       | 
       | One thing I wish was different is choosing a different language
       | as the native and "official" one. GDScript is OK and arguably
       | pretty good Python-like language for beginners and rapid
       | prototyping, C# is OK and is probably very nice to have because
       | many people would be happy to switch from Unity, but I personally
       | would be happier with either better C++ support (which I know
       | exists in GDNative interface which was improved in 4.0) or
       | something else.
       | 
       | C# is a fine language, but I have a feeling it has so much
       | presence in GameDev just because of Unity. It's way too verbose
       | and the tooling isn't as good (outside of full Visual Studio
       | which I have no desire to use), but maybe "actual programming"
       | part of GameDev isn't as important and I should just give in/use
       | GDScript.
        
         | suda50 wrote:
         | Starting with Godot 4.0, they now support GDExtension which
         | allows you to basically write your own game code in C++ (and
         | other languages), then have the engine import your code: https:
         | //docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g....
         | There is also a set of Rust bindings that utilize GDExtension
         | too: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext.
         | 
         | They might be worth looking into.
        
           | kirillbobyrev wrote:
           | Yeah, I've seen those and I'm happy Godot moves in this
           | direction, but using these tools would steer me away from the
           | "default" and "primary" behavior, I'd potentially face more
           | bugs/awkward development setups.
           | 
           | It might be worth if I'm serious about Game Development and
           | ready to invest time and effort into customizing the tools,
           | but what I'm looking for is "out of the box" experience which
           | will make it easier for me to solve problems that I face
           | (e.g. if I ask questions more people would be able to
           | answer/help), the tutorials/resources I find will be more
           | applicable etc.
           | 
           | As others mentioned in this thread, having first-class
           | support for a language isn't the same as providing API for
           | plugins and custom scripts.
           | 
           | I wish Godot chose a real existing programming language
           | instead of building their own DSL. Even Lua might have been a
           | decent choice, although I hate the syntax.
        
       | gminic wrote:
       | "C#/.NET
       | 
       | The focus in this release was on bringing feature parity between
       | C# and GDScript.
       | 
       | When using GDScript, you can define a new node type to use in the
       | editor by adding a global class name to your script.
       | 
       | Starting from Godot 4.1, this is also possible in C# by adding
       | the [GlobalClass] attribute to your file, thanks to Raul Santos
       | and Will Nations. You can also use the [Icon] attribute to give
       | your global class a unique icon.
       | 
       | Note that as of this release projects made with C# still cannot
       | be exported to mobile and web platforms. We are working on
       | providing the support as soon as possible, but the resolution of
       | this limitation will likely depend on the release of .NET 8 at
       | the end of 2023. This means that the work on enabling mobile and
       | web platforms can only truly start later this year."
        
       | manishsharan wrote:
       | Could someone advise if this is a suitable platform and language
       | for 10 year olds to learn Game programming ? My kid feels that he
       | has outgrown Scratch and he is looking for a better platform .
       | Will GDscript be easy for him to learn ?
        
         | suda50 wrote:
         | I haven't used Scratch but I think Godot might be one of the
         | easier engines to get into compared to Unity and Unreal Engine.
         | GDScript (https://gdscript.com/) is a custom language created
         | for Godot and is similar to Python so it will be more
         | complicated than creating games with Scratch since you will be
         | writing out code explicitly rather than dragging blocks
         | together. GDScript is immensely easier to use than C# (Unity)
         | and C++ (Unreal), though.
         | 
         | It might be worth looking at GD Quest
         | (https://www.gdquest.com/tutorial/godot/learning-
         | paths/gettin...) to determine if it's something your kid would
         | want to learn and get into. As a developer, I found it very
         | easy to start to get started with Godot versus Unity and Unreal
         | so it might be a fun adventure for your kid to start learning
         | :)
        
         | gmjosack wrote:
         | I've been doing Godot development with my 9yo and he loves it.
         | If you're looking for something with less emphasis on text
         | based programming Construct and GDevelop are engines I've heard
         | good things about as a continuation from Scratch.
        
           | gmjosack wrote:
           | To add to this I found these tutorials good starting points
           | for a structured lesson with my kids. Would do about 30m-1h a
           | day (mostly up to whenever they get bored). When we started
           | off we'd focus on letting them run the GUI changes and I'd
           | work on the code and explain the concepts to them until they
           | started wanting to do the coding themselves.
           | 
           | https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/first.
           | .. https://kidscancode.org/godot_recipes/4.x/games/first_2d/i
           | nd...
           | 
           | After that my son wanted to switch to making his own game so
           | we've been re-implementing boss fights from cuphead and
           | lately he wants to make an idle game.
           | 
           | I've also found its fun to just get them to be part of the
           | design process in game jams. It's really great to see the
           | creative ideas that come out of young kids and game making
           | with kids has been super fun and educational.
        
       | speedster217 wrote:
       | Anyone have any tutorials on Godot that they recommend?
       | 
       | I've got a small RPG prototype that runs in the console but would
       | love to give it an actual GUI/sprite graphics.
        
         | josh_p wrote:
         | gamedev.tv has a godot course updated for 4.0. I haven't gone
         | through that one but their other stuff is really good. Just
         | wait for sale. they usually go down to $10-$15 for a course.
        
         | qwery wrote:
         | The official docs[0] are definitely the way to go.
         | 
         | [0]
         | https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/intro...
        
           | cyber_kinetist wrote:
           | I've done both the official 2D/3D game tutorials in the
           | official documentation, and although the 2D game tutorial
           | wasn't that bad, the 3D tutorial was quite disappointing as a
           | learning experience. It's still not ported to Godot 4, and
           | they use some weird hacky code to achieve some basic gameplay
           | stuff. (And the finished game itself isn't really that
           | interesting...) Even the 2D tutorial leaves something to be
           | desired, since it just dumps heaps of instructions/code at
           | you without explaining you a more general picture first
           | (which wouldn't be a problem for more experienced
           | programmers, but beginners would definitely struggle)
           | 
           | That said... it's still the most comprehensively written
           | Godot tutorial to date, so I recommend at least trying out
           | the 2D tutorial.
        
           | aglione wrote:
           | Nathan from GDQuest was hired to write/improve them
           | 
           | https://godotengine.org/article/we-hired-gdquest-work-
           | manual...
           | 
           | I absolutely recommend GDQuest courses, apart from the Godot
           | engine they have a very clean idea about writing software.
        
         | risingsubmarine wrote:
         | I did one of Heartbeast's courses. Can recommend.
         | 
         | He recently put out one for Godot 4 specifically.
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8-JVjtJlIQ
        
         | amitmathew wrote:
         | We have a free tutorial for Godot 4 that takes you from the
         | start to a complete game in about two hours. You can find it
         | here: https://quiver.dev/tutorials/create-your-first-
         | godot-4-game/.
         | 
         | Disclaimer: I'm the founder of the company that produced this
         | course, but the tutorial is free and the custom assets used in
         | the tutorial are liberally licensed.
        
         | debacle wrote:
         | GD Quest is considered the bog standard right now. It's the
         | W3Schools for Godot.
         | 
         | As someone who is switching to Godot from Unity however, I
         | think the tutorial ecosystem for Godot is a long ways behind.
        
           | galleywest200 wrote:
           | Most of the tutorials I have seen still exist for Godot 3.X
           | as opposed to 4.X, so it will just take some time is my
           | prediction.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | Here is my programming tutorial list on Youtube, it has some
         | Godot tutorials:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwYfcDZR0fFcROLjkiyBW...
         | 
         | A lot of tutorials you'll find will be for Godot 3 so be sure
         | to search for Godot 4 specifically as a filter. Otherwise be
         | willing to take into account that you'll have to figure out how
         | to make the tutorial code work for your version of Godot (which
         | can be an educational experience in and of itself.)
        
       | jokoon wrote:
       | I love godot, but:
       | 
       | * gdscript is not python, it's lacking several small python
       | things that makes python awesome: list/dict comprehension,
       | .items(), sets, although gdscript is quite enough and still quite
       | a good language for game dev as it does just everything well,
       | especially for natives types etc.
       | 
       | * I tried gdnative and I still need to try gdextension, but so
       | far writing C++ for godot seems quite hairy and the programmer
       | must use godot types and "new()" everywhere, which is not really
       | easy to deal with, so godot is not really a C++ engine, C++ is
       | only usable if you want to optimize something a bit tedious,
       | which is fine, but important to remember, and it confirms the
       | whole "use a scripting language 99% of the time, and use C++ only
       | if scripting is not fast enough"
       | 
       | * I would still want to inspect the real potential performance of
       | gdscript compared to other languages, and I don't know if
       | mono/.net is faster. It seems like a very good language
       | especially because it integrate perfectly with how the
       | environment is designed, but I'm still curious if they plan to
       | improve it.
       | 
       | * I'm planning to make a multiplayer FPS game, but I don't think
       | godot provides network prediction, and I wish it did.
       | 
       | * I'm a bit worried about opengl support in the future, it's not
       | entirely done yet, and I'm afraid it's too difficult to properly
       | implement because new API like vulkan or DX12 are so radically
       | different.
       | 
       | Overall godot is the greatest thing that ever happened to open
       | source and game development, game development is one area where
       | open source has trouble making its teeth, and the lightweight
       | design of godot makes it just such a big relief when you compare
       | it to monsters like unreal and unity.
        
         | jackmott42 wrote:
         | Yes, .NET is faster. Though even AAA games often use slow
         | scripting languages for game logic. Many games, the game logic
         | just isn't a big CPU hog so it doesn't matter.
        
         | hoten wrote:
         | What does network prediction from a game framework look like?
         | You describe what properties of objects should be interpolated
         | and the engine handles it for you?
        
           | jokoon wrote:
           | Yes, I guess, properties like projectile/player velocity?
           | Network prediction is a bit tedious to do because it's a lot
           | of fine tuning.
           | 
           | It's only useful for latency sensitive games like FPS games
           | or any games that involves simple physics with player versus
           | player situations.
        
         | bodge5000 wrote:
         | > gdscript is not python, it's lacking several small python
         | things that makes python awesome: list/dict comprehension,
         | .items(), sets, although gdscript is quite enough and still
         | quite a good language for game dev as it does just everything
         | well, especially for natives types etc.
         | 
         | This is my biggest issue with Godot, although not that GDScript
         | isn't python, its that it isn't a "real" language (or I guess
         | general purpose might be a better word). In fact its probably
         | the only thing I miss from Unity.
         | 
         | To be fair I'm not sure I'd pick Python myself, as much as I
         | love the language I'd probably pick something with a bit more
         | focus on performance. Go might be a good choice, I dont know.
         | 
         | It's not even that GDScript is bad, in fact without comparing
         | it to other languages its pretty great, but you just lose so
         | much when compared to general purpose languages. I know theres
         | bindings, but having done the same with Raylib the support for
         | non-official languages is pretty much non-existent. Its pretty
         | bad for Mono, which is an official binding
        
           | sli wrote:
           | The official C# bindings are .NET, not Mono. They were using
           | Mono in older versions, though.
        
           | jackmott42 wrote:
           | There are _official_ bindings to C#, the official docs have
           | C# examples in them, and it can use the latest and greatest
           | .NET versions, not just mono.
        
             | bodge5000 wrote:
             | The docs have c# examples, but the community by and large
             | uses gdscript, it's the "default" language. Again, it's the
             | same with Raylib, bindings have documentation but it's
             | difficult to find anything using that language outside the
             | docs.
        
       | billfruit wrote:
       | Is this version having c++ support? Is development using c++
       | really viable in Godot?
       | 
       | Why did they have to invent GDScript? Is there any reason why
       | they could not have chosen a existing language?
        
         | sebastianz wrote:
         | This is explained in detail in the F.A.Q. here:
         | https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#doc-fa...
        
       | xwowsersx wrote:
       | If anyone here has created something using Godot that is publicly
       | available, would you kindly provide a link to share it here?
        
         | gmjosack wrote:
         | The 4 games on this page were all made in Godot:
         | 
         | https://gareb3ar.itch.io/
        
       | gerardpg wrote:
       | Outstanding work, congratulations to the Godot team.
        
       | SturgeonsLaw wrote:
       | Godot is super cool and I have a ton of respect for all the
       | people who put in time to make software like this and Blender et
       | al so damn good
        
       | birracerveza wrote:
       | Godot may not be able to take on Unreal, but I certainly am
       | cheering for it to take over Unity.
       | 
       | Excellent engine, and more and more developers are rightfully
       | recognizing its potential.
        
         | ehnto wrote:
         | Unity is it's own beast like Unreal but in a different way,
         | Unity as a platform supports mobile monetization in a way other
         | platforms don't and Godot won't be cutting their lunch in that
         | ecosystem any time soon.
         | 
         | But I suspect you mean for indie dev, in which case I totally
         | agree. Godot is the lightweight, get out of your way and build
         | shit framework that people want Unity to be. Godot is better at
         | that task by a long shot.
        
           | birracerveza wrote:
           | It's very telling that Unity is where it is because of
           | monetization.
           | 
           | Godot on the other hand is being picked up because it's an
           | excellent engine. Maybe it's not going to kill Unity, but
           | it's certainly going to relegate it to a shovelware low
           | effort money grab engine.
        
             | resoluteteeth wrote:
             | > It's very telling that Unity is where it is because of
             | monetization.
             | 
             | No, it's absolutely not. It may happen to have mobile
             | monetization features built in but it's where it is because
             | it's been the best general game engine for everything other
             | than AAA 3d games, although Godot is catching up.
        
         | stuckinhell wrote:
         | if you can replicate the marketplace, you probably could take
         | on Unity
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | It would be insane to even try to compete with Unreal, an
         | engine focused on AAA games that's been around for decades,
         | with a large full-time staff. No open-source project will ever
         | match them, because it's a moving target.
         | 
         | Fortunately Unreal Engine is a poor choice for many types of
         | games, and Godot is doing a great job carving out its niche
         | with 2D games and simpler 3D games. There's still a big market
         | for 2D games, and surprisingly there aren't a ton of engines
         | which do a good job supporting them. Godot is easily among the
         | best.
        
           | nomel wrote:
           | > Fortunately Unreal Engine is a poor choice for many types
           | of games
           | 
           | Do you have some examples? Seeing these 2d games made me
           | question some assumptions I heard [1].
           | 
           | [1] https://youtu.be/wreOjWVGkys?t=43
        
             | dvtkrlbs wrote:
             | I mean the problem is 2d game tools isn't getting loves for
             | some time. Paper2d which is the main component of UE for 2d
             | games still haven't updated with UE 5 last time I checked.
             | So it misses a lot of feature parity.
        
       | d11z wrote:
       | The main contributor/developer behind Godot also released a very
       | handy little tool that is capable of fully decompiling anything
       | made with Godot:
       | 
       | https://github.com/bruvzg/gdsdecomp
        
         | nightowl_games wrote:
         | Cool tool but the main, lead, original developer of Godot is
         | reduz - Juan Linietsky.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | johnday wrote:
       | Godot is a super impressive piece of kit. I'm waiting for a
       | reason to start a new game project so that I can get to grips
       | with it more firmly, but what they've been able to do with a
       | relative small team puts Unity to shame. (Even more than Unity
       | puts itself to shame)
       | 
       | > This update fixes over 900 issues that users have reported from
       | using Godot 4 or while helping contributors test 4.1 with pre-
       | release builds.
       | 
       | Fixing that many issues while further improving performance and
       | stability is itself worthy of commendation. Well done Godot team!
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | Fixing 900 issues is definitely impressive, but Godot is
         | probably one of repos with the most open issues on GitHub
         | (5000+ at this moment).
         | 
         | Again the number of open issues is not a good indicator of
         | software quality anyway.
        
           | SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
           | To be more specific, godot has 8009 open issues at the time
           | of writing.
           | 
           | Certainly one of! I'm only aware of flutter/flutter and rust-
           | lang/rust outranking it.
        
           | qwery wrote:
           | Godot's issue tracker is very popular! There have been ~4700
           | issues created _this year_ , more than half of which have
           | been closed, with ~2000 currently open.
           | 
           | Also of note, there's an open proposal[0] 'Automatically
           | close old issues in a way everyone should be happy with'
           | attempting to deal with the significant backlog.
           | 
           | [0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot-
           | proposals/issues/3481
        
           | baud147258 wrote:
           | Actually it's 8000+ open issues on Github. It seems the
           | number is capped at 5k in the header of the Github webpage.
           | On the other hand, it's got 34k closed issues, so it's not as
           | if the devs weren't working on this
        
             | Sakos wrote:
             | I wonder how it ranks compared to other github projects in
             | number of issues opened vs issues closed/resolved, median
             | time to resolve issues, etc.
        
             | raincole wrote:
             | TIL.
             | 
             | Github should give them a special badge (Github
             | achievement?) for breaking the 5k limit.
        
           | retrofuturism wrote:
           | In this case the number of open issues is a good indicator of
           | usage. Well done Godot!
        
       | koromak wrote:
       | I started using Godot for the first time last week! First attempt
       | at game dev. I'm finding it quite friendly to learn.
        
       | bodge5000 wrote:
       | Great to see a focus on reliability, I moved back to Godot 3.5 as
       | 4 kept crashing for me so I've been missing out on some of the
       | new features (suprisingly, the one I was most excited about is
       | the improvements to procedural skyboxes, and they certainly lived
       | up to the hype)
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | There is a Star Fox clone made in Godot, Ex-Zodiac. Cool game.
        
         | skrowl wrote:
         | [dead]
        
       | ireallywantthat wrote:
       | Godot is really turning good release by release. I'm very happy
       | for Godot and the team. I'm interested in these features from
       | Godot in future. I hope they implement them in Future Releases.
       | 
       | 1. FSR2
       | 
       | 2. Excellent Wayland Support
       | 
       | 3. LLM Integration. It might make NPCs more realistic
        
         | eBombzor wrote:
         | Hardware accelerated ray tracing?
        
         | chme wrote:
         | > 3. LLM Integration. It might make NPCs more realistic
         | 
         | Not sure. That doesn't seems game engine related and more game
         | specific. I think integrating LLM is just some scripting in
         | your game.
         | 
         | In terms of AI integration, I would be more interested in AI
         | supported design. Like you describe a map, character or
         | scenario, and the AI will generate something for you, which you
         | then can customize and adapt. But even that is probably best
         | done outside of the core game engine...
        
       | nightowl_games wrote:
       | Godots killer feature is the integrated documentation.
        
         | southwesterly wrote:
         | So much yes to this. I like being offline when I work to avoid
         | distractions and this is amazing.
        
           | nightowl_games wrote:
           | The unity documentation drives me nuts.
           | 
           | I also compile Godot when I use it so I can read the source
           | and step thru stuff if I ever have a problem.
           | 
           | I get paid to use Godot tho, and am a contributor, I'm not
           | the typical user.
        
       | jcmontx wrote:
       | First time hearing about this engine. How does it compare to
       | Unity/Unreal? Not a game dev btw
        
         | LanceH wrote:
         | Unreal has everything in 3D game development. On the downside,
         | Unreal has everything in 3D game development. Godot can
         | definitely make 3D games, but if you need Unreal level tooling,
         | there is only one choice. 3D games are definitely possible in
         | Godot.
         | 
         | I see the 2D comparison much stronger for Godot. The biggest
         | draws for Unity are if you already know it, you are already
         | excellent with C#, or if you need to deploy to consoles.
         | 
         | Godot has everything I've wanted in 2D development (as a
         | serious hobbyist). I can get straight into the source code and
         | modify the engine as needed. I really, really like the
         | composition model of building out nodes, Godot and it leads to
         | excellent code reuse. No licensing issues at all.
         | 
         | Asset stores are definitely better for Unreal and Unity.
         | 
         | As a hobbyist I'm incredibly happy with Godot. I could
         | definitely see it for 2D PC development. If I had consoles in
         | mind Unity.
         | 
         | Anything 3D I would invest my time in Unreal. Godot might be
         | able to handle a current 3D project, but as I move on from that
         | project I would be looking at Unreal with envy.
        
         | chii wrote:
         | godot is less "full featured" than UE. It can compete with
         | unity in terms of features, but i think the ecosystem for unity
         | is much bigger.
         | 
         | Godot is much easier to learn and use imho. And being open
         | source means you have access (unlike unity).
        
       | clessg wrote:
       | I haven't seen it mentioned yet, so does anybody have experience
       | comparing Phaser with Godot (for 2d games)?
        
       | xyzzy3000 wrote:
       | I like the engine, but the name is essentially one that has no
       | consensus on how it should be pronounced (emphasis on the first
       | syllable, emphasis on the second, or equal emphasis on both).
       | 
       | Some background here in the context of the original play from
       | which the name is derived - sorry about the paywall:
       | https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/theater/the-right-way-to-...
        
         | amitmathew wrote:
         | It's funny, I met the two co-creators of Godot at GDC this year
         | and they both pronounce it differently. So there may never be a
         | consensus!
        
       | ubermonkey wrote:
       | Man, I've been WAITING for this!
       | 
       | (What, nothing? I'll show myself out.)
        
       | aero-glide2 wrote:
       | Sadly GPT hasn't been trained on GODOT 4, so it's been very
       | difficult to develop.
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | What if I told you... it's possible to write your own code?
        
       | sen wrote:
       | I recently switched almost entirely from Unity to Godot 4.0 (not
       | a career game dev, I just make small/indie/itch.io type stuff)
       | and I've been absolutely loving it. It's such a breath of fresh
       | air. It's light, fast, easy to learn, and can do 90% of what you
       | need as a solo/indie type developer.
       | 
       | The only thing stopping me from swapping over entirely and giving
       | up Unity for good is the bug that means games take forever to
       | load on itch.io if the user has MacOS (long enough that they
       | think it's broken and close the tab). A majority of the games I
       | make are educational and/or targeted at kids who are using iPads
       | or MacBooks, and being able to link them to itch.io is a LOT
       | easier than teaching them (and convincing the device owner) to
       | install the game locally.
       | 
       | They say they're working on it (quoted below), but until then I'm
       | pretty much stuck using Unity for a few projects still. If/when
       | they fix this, I think Godot could really take off for the
       | itch.io/gamejam/etc type crowd.
       | 
       | > As of 4.1 web exports still have some limitations due to poor
       | vendor support of certain modern features. Browsers with bad
       | WebGL 2 support, such as Chrome on macOS, unfortunately suffer
       | from issues which we cannot address without a fix from Google or
       | a significant amount of effort put into supporting a dedicated
       | WebGL 1 / GLES2 renderer.
       | 
       | > We are also aware of the complexity setting up web games on
       | hosting platforms which don't let you set the required CORS
       | headers for SharedArrayBuffer support. This mostly depends on
       | Safari implementing the coep:credentialless header support, while
       | Chromium-based browsers and Firefox already work fine (especially
       | if you publish on itch.io). There is a possible workaround that
       | we are investigating.
        
         | mentos wrote:
         | Any opinion on the state of VR on Godot? I'm using UE4 which I
         | have 9 year's experience in and not the biggest fan of Unity
         | but would be curious to try out Godot.
        
           | FireInsight wrote:
           | I just _very_ recently started working on a VR game in Godot
           | and the setup was very easy. They also have a project where
           | common parts such as teleporting are implemented, which I
           | didn 't try yet, but which seems cool.
        
           | sen wrote:
           | I don't do VR, but I've seen some videos on YT showing people
           | do VR stuff in Godot so it "works", but I'm not sure how
           | well.
        
           | nurple wrote:
           | It's a dream compared to UE. I tried on and off over a couple
           | years to power through building some toy VR apps in UE and
           | was never really able to make much progress past their prefab
           | maps. It's just so freaking complex that, IME, the fun of the
           | process gets crushed under the weight of making zero forward
           | progress.
           | 
           | As I started a NixOS immersion program a few months back I
           | was looking for a new platform that I could do 100% of my dev
           | on Linux. Ran into godot searching vids on YouTube and was
           | really impressed with the workflows so I installed godot and
           | steam (home.packages = [ pkgs.unstable.godot_4 pkgs.steam ]).
           | With openXR support built into godot 4, it automatically
           | picked up the shared lib that stream dropped and in under an
           | hour was walking around using my index and Vive in a VR env
           | and could also build a package for my son's quest.
           | 
           | Within a month on-the-side I had built a tabletopesque tank
           | battle game with a custom ray-based suspension over high poly
           | terrain, particle effects, ballistic artillery, and a unique
           | controller input scheme based on the tilt of the controllers
           | (left for body rotation, right for turret). The physics
           | engine is great, rocking the body on fire was simple as an
           | inverse impulse of the shell spawn vector, and the body
           | properly rolls under both lateral and longitudinal axis by
           | virtue of the damped shocks.
           | 
           | All that to say, I think the biggest difference is that with
           | godot 90% of my effort, code, and time was spent writing
           | implementation code for my game while on UE it was spent
           | writing integration code.
           | 
           | You obviously miss out on hot topic things like nanite et al,
           | but I learned a long time ago that fidelity has no
           | correlation with an engaging game. The other con will likely
           | be around performance, it's passable at 90hz, but if you want
           | to start hitting framerates like 144hz, the critical code
           | will probably need to drop to C++ using GDExtention.
           | 
           | I've also noticed that, with the popularity gaining in gltf,
           | that it was rather trivial to find quality assets with native
           | support.
           | 
           | I'd recommend watching some vids on creating VR apps, and
           | another great resource, if you want to grok the interface
           | code, is godot's xr-tools project:
           | https://github.com/GodotVR/godot-xr-
           | tools/tree/master/addons...
        
             | prox wrote:
             | Your experience also confirms what I feel Godot is
             | particularly suited for : playtesting and pre-production of
             | parts of your game.
             | 
             | You could quickly bang together all kinds of parts to see
             | if your idea works, and then incorporate those in other
             | engines if you so wish.
        
         | HanClinto wrote:
         | I'm in a similar boat, and eventually realized that Godot 3.5.2
         | is still the LTS version and still exports just great for the
         | web -- this is the example that convinced me it was time to
         | switch: https://yet-another-lucas.github.io/plumbing-adventure/
         | 
         | After I realized this, I decided to switch from Godot 4.0 C# to
         | Godot 3.5.2 with GDScript and I've been happy ever since. I've
         | even got it set up with a CI/CD pipeline to automatically
         | build-and-deploy to Github Pages whenever I commit to master --
         | these CI/CD pipelines are pretty sweet.
         | 
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/q25riu/hosting_on_gi...
        
           | schemescape wrote:
           | How long should that game take to load?
           | 
           | It took a good 20 - 30 seconds for me.
        
             | henryfjordan wrote:
             | loaded very quickly for me, 1-2s maybe on a macbook pro on
             | 13.2.1
        
           | cven714 wrote:
           | > https://yet-another-lucas.github.io/plumbing-adventure/
           | 
           | Nice, I made a version of that game myself following the
           | tutorials of https://www.youtube.com/@uheartbeast
           | 
           | This was a while ago, he recently put out a ton of new
           | tutorials for Godot 4, good stuff for quickly getting your
           | hands dirty. You're beyond that point I'm sure, just throwing
           | them out here for anyone else looking for nice intro content.
        
             | sli wrote:
             | I would say Heartbeast's courses are overall _much_ better
             | than your typical tutorial content, primarily because they
             | are structured and built like courses rather than
             | tutorials. I paid for a couple of his courses a while back
             | after doing one of his free ones and do not regret it, they
             | were excellent.
        
             | HanClinto wrote:
             | Thank you for the link! I didn't make the linked example --
             | my work is MUCH simpler than that. :D This was what someone
             | else built and packaged and convinced me that this
             | performance is finally rivaling the Flash experience that
             | I've been missing for so long.
        
         | eieio wrote:
         | I've built 5 small browser-based game-jammy games (e.g. nothing
         | that took me more than ~2 weeks) in Godot 3.5 this year[1] and
         | have largely enjoyed the experience - I'll echo other folks and
         | say that you might just be happy using Godot 3.5 until Godot 4
         | has functional web exports.
         | 
         | Godot 4 _does_ come with some language improvements that I'm
         | excited about, particularly around better typing support and
         | fewer places where you need magic strings (e.g. you can refer
         | to signals by name!) - I suppose if that's a big sticking point
         | for you (totally reasonable!) then waiting might just be
         | better.
         | 
         | I will say that at times I've been frustrated by the Godot 4
         | team's perspective that the MacOS breakage is a Chrome bug and
         | not a regression in Godot[2]. It's really a question of
         | semantics and prioritization more than anything but it's hard
         | for me to not see the behavior as a regression when a feature
         | that I rely on in Godot 3 is broken in Godot 4.
         | 
         | That said I'm very grateful for all the work that's gone into
         | Godot 4 (and prior versions) and I'm very excited for the day
         | that I get to use it!
         | 
         | [1] They're all over at https://eieio.games/ if you're curious!
         | 
         | [2] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/70691
        
         | xwowsersx wrote:
         | Is anything you've built with Godot publicly available
         | somewhere? If so, can you share?
        
         | Nezteb wrote:
         | Yeah I tried to participate in a Ludum Dare jam shortly after
         | 4.0 came out and was hit with the web export issues.
         | 
         | Here are some issues worth tracking:
         | https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues?q=is:open+is:iss...
        
         | flohofwoe wrote:
         | > Browsers with bad WebGL 2 support, such as Chrome on macOS.
         | 
         | This caught my eye. I haven't run into any WebGL2 problems so
         | far on Chrome/macOS, would be interesting to know what
         | specifically those problems are (however I'm also staying away
         | from some WebGL2/GLES3 features which are known to cause
         | trouble not just on WebGL2, mostly uniform buffers and
         | generally some buffer update patterns that work well on native,
         | but not on WebGL (such as 'buffer orphaning').
        
           | hoten wrote:
           | Also curious what this refers to. Anyone find a crbug?
        
             | omoikane wrote:
             | Probably this one: https://crbug.com/1324296
             | 
             | Linked from here:
             | https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/70691
        
               | hoten wrote:
               | > Our team's goal is to ship ANGLE's Metal backend
               | imminently. Blocking on that shipment so that hopefully
               | we don't have to diagnose this more deeply.
               | 
               | Fantastic news for the Godot folks.
        
         | g4zj wrote:
         | I'm a macOS user who makes games using Godot and publishes them
         | on itch.io, and I haven't experienced this issue. Can you link
         | to an example where this occurs, and provide some information
         | on how the build was exported?
        
           | HanClinto wrote:
           | You're probably using 3.5.x? The majority of web export
           | issues only happen on 4.X.
        
             | g4zj wrote:
             | I have both installed and am migrating a game between them
             | now. I don't believe I've actually exported the 4.x version
             | for using the HTML5 profile just yet, so I'll have to give
             | that a go.
        
               | HanClinto wrote:
               | It'd be worth your time before you get too deep. The two
               | issues that I ran into:
               | 
               | * CORS issues -- deploying on some sites (esp. gitlab and
               | github pages) runs into issues because of shared buffer
               | requests.
               | 
               | * Assuming you get past the CORS issues, there is still
               | extremely slow load on OSX Chrome -- the app eventually
               | loads, but holy smokes it takes forever.
               | 
               | Both of those nearly made me give up on Godot, but I'm
               | very happy to stay with 3.5.x until those get resolved.
        
               | g4zj wrote:
               | Thanks for the information. I am mostly migrating the
               | game to get a first-hand idea of some of the changes I'm
               | most likely to run into while developing the next one.
               | 
               | I, too, am happy to stay with 3.5.x. It works pretty well
               | for my purposes, though hopefully 4.x will be a viable
               | option for me soon.
        
           | gmjosack wrote:
           | This is definitely a known issue that I've personally
           | experienced but is even listed as a warning on the docs[1].
           | 
           | > Godot 4's HTML5 exports currently cannot run on macOS and
           | iOS due to upstream bugs with SharedArrayBuffer and WebGL
           | 2.0. We recommend using macOS and iOS native export
           | functionality instead, as it will also result in better
           | performance.
           | 
           | > Godot 3's HTML5 exports are more compatible with various
           | browsers in general, especially when using the GLES2
           | rendering backend (which only requires WebGL 1.0).
           | 
           | Web exports are essentially unusable for Mac users. It's the
           | biggest complaint I get from my games using Godot 4.x.
           | 
           | [1] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/e
           | xpo...
        
         | DarkNova6 wrote:
         | As somebody contemplating building a 2D strategy game, how good
         | is the C# support?
         | 
         | This was a killer feature for Unity over Unreal. If Godot has
         | similarly good integration, it looks like a better choice.
        
           | sirwhinesalot wrote:
           | It's still a bit janky compared to their own GDScript, but C#
           | is supported yes. Because there are two languages though, and
           | C# is the second class citizen, you won't find as many
           | examples on how to do things in C# as in GDScript.
        
             | DarkNova6 wrote:
             | Thanks for the input. Given my background, I think I can
             | figure out the syntax just fine if necessary. I am just
             | sceptical of languages where typing is not strictly static
             | (and I give a hard pass on pure dynamic typing).
        
               | runevault wrote:
               | FYI a lot if not all of the core docs actually have tabs
               | on any code samples to switch between c# and gdscript so
               | while tutorials from third parties tend to focus on one
               | or the other, the core docs are a bit better.
               | 
               | I've started going through a tutorial on youtube from I
               | think finepointCGI about a horror game in Godot, he is
               | actually doing it twice, once with GDScript and once with
               | c#, so if you want to see someone with some godot
               | experience using c# give it a look.
        
           | WinstonSmith84 wrote:
           | It works relatively well, and actually better than in Unity
           | (which use an older C# version), but unfortunately it does
           | not work everywhere. For example, it's not possible to export
           | to the web, which was to me the main show stopper. I needed
           | C# due to some libraries, and I needed that it runs in a
           | browser, so that was game over, no pun intended.
           | 
           | Apart from that, I really preferred Godot over Unity. Faster,
           | more consistent, better learning curve, etc.
        
             | Doddler wrote:
             | Are you sure it can't export c# to web? I would have
             | assumed that as true but Godot's documentation does not
             | list that as a limitation, and in fact offers c# code on
             | how to use the JavaScript interop, something that would be
             | pretty meaningless without support.
        
               | WinstonSmith84 wrote:
               | Yes. https://godotengine.org/article/godot-4-1-is-here/
               | 
               | > Note that as of this release projects made with C#
               | still cannot be exported to mobile and web platforms. We
               | are working on providing the support as soon as possible,
               | but the resolution of this limitation will likely depend
               | on the release of .NET 8 at the end of 2023. This means
               | that the work on enabling mobile and web platforms can
               | only truly start later this year.
        
             | DarkNova6 wrote:
             | Thank you, this is really helpful input. It does seem
             | likely Godot will be our engine of choice.
        
           | TillE wrote:
           | It's worth noting that Godot 4 is using actual .NET instead
           | of Mono, so you get all the tooling support that implies,
           | including seamless debugging with Visual Studio, etc. Unity
           | has been promising that transition for years, but I'm pretty
           | sure they're still using some customized version of Mono.
           | 
           | So you can write a game with .NET 7 and everything is great.
           | There's a little bit of extra overhead when making calls into
           | the Godot engine, so you still may want to use bits of C++
           | for performance where it matters, but otherwise there are
           | only a few rough edges left.
        
             | gabereiser wrote:
             | Unity wants to transpile it to C++ code. IL2CPP where they
             | take the IL code of your C# and translate it into C++ for
             | speed. So yeah, not only are they NOT using dotnet tooling
             | but they are going the opposite direction.
        
         | doctorpangloss wrote:
         | > ...who are using iPads or MacBooks, and being able to link
         | them to itch.io is a LOT easier than...
         | 
         | The instant game streaming service I develop targets Unity (see
         | https://appmana.com/watch/virtualtestdrive for an example) and
         | I was considering supporting Godot. But it would probably make
         | more sense to fix web exports.
         | 
         | Other than time and money, what obstacles did you face
         | contributing a web export fix for Godot? I am not saying that
         | you should, but I'm sure it crossed your mind.
         | 
         | In the game services business, it's my opinion that in order to
         | thrive, you target people who pay. Because Unity costs money,
         | it attracts developers who pay. It's the halo effect. I wonder
         | how the Godot ecosystem attracts developers who pay.
        
       | loustak wrote:
       | I have shipped two small projects using Godot 3. It's a cool
       | engine but to me it can improve on the following points to be
       | considered a mature engine for a new indie project: * GDscript is
       | cool but lacks features such as better typing and lambdas over
       | generic nodes. * I have encountered many bugs in the Engine more
       | than when I was using GameMaker. * It lacks native mobile
       | monetization.
       | 
       | Other than that I'm much more enjoying working with Godot than
       | Unity.
        
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