[HN Gopher] W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development...
___________________________________________________________________
W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with Godot
Engine
Author : j_maffe
Score : 400 points
Date : 2023-12-09 10:55 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (w4games.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (w4games.com)
| anonylizard wrote:
| Is this some VC's pouncing on Unity's missteps? How serious was
| the damage to Unity's credibility after the installation fee
| disaster? How big is the moat for unity?
| truegoric wrote:
| It kinda does sound like EEE.
|
| ,,W4 Games will strengthen our role within the Godot ecosystem
| by supporting its open-source development and continuing to
| build products and services to facilitate Godot's expansion,
| such as W4 Consoles (an approved middleware console porting
| solution for Godot games) and W4 Cloud (multi-tenant service to
| support millions of users)."
| Vespasian wrote:
| Getting game engines in console and providing support for
| developers is certainly a business. I've met some people who
| brought their custom (more simple ) engines/games to consoles
| and there is money in providing a ready made solution which,
| by the nature of it, cannot be open source or permissive.
|
| The main question is it the "10x in 3 years" kind of business
| or the "steady stream of a small medim profit" variety.
| SXX wrote:
| It's not EEE because W4 Games actually founded by some of top
| Godot contributors who continue to work on FOSS version as
| well. There just some things you can't have open source like
| console platform support code.
| arjonagelhout wrote:
| Unity still has a more mature product compared to Godot, so for
| many projects it won't be feasible to switch to Godot.
|
| Unity is easier to use, has more fully featured and higher
| quality rendering pipelines, more integrations with other
| software, a larger asset store and the ability to quickly add
| advertisements to a game using Unity Ads. (etcetera)
|
| That said, we stopped using Unity because of the term changes
| and are now focusing on building a custom game engine, but our
| use case is way different than game studios.
|
| In game studios it's a numbers game. e.g. How much does it cost
| to retrain our staff to switch to a different engine versus the
| benefits. From what I can see, Unity has not yet made its
| product so unattractive that it won't be used for future
| productions.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is business as usual for big studios, maybe a couple of
| indies decided to port their games to GDScript or do not care
| about the platforms where C#/Godot isn't available.
| broken_clock wrote:
| Godot currently doesn't even have good support for things like
| in-app purchases for iOS/Android. No one is willing to work on
| stuff like that for free/open-source fun.
|
| I think the big moat is that for studios, games are so risky to
| make, that there's no reason to take on tech risk by possibly
| running into issues like this. You know Unity will work for
| basically any non AAA game you want to make.
|
| Hopefully this $15m closes that gap.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Google Play IAP: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-google-
| play-billing
|
| iOS IAP: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-ios-plugins
| username256 wrote:
| The iOS one is unmaintained and has been for a while (it
| still doesn't officially support Godot 4.x). Supposedly it
| should be maintained again by EOY but we've yet to see any
| progress on it.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Maintaining this yourself is trivial. We sell IAPS on
| Android, iOS, Steam & XSolla in the Godot game engine.
| Android and iOS are the easiest. This is really, really
| minor stuff we're talking about here.
| broken_clock wrote:
| Maybe you can write a blog post or a reddit thread?
|
| There were a bunch of people asking about it on Discord
| for Godot 4, and some confused reddit threads offering to
| pay people for a tutorial:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/11vxeo7/can_i_ple
| ase...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/13ka6qc/will_pay_
| to_...
| npinsker wrote:
| Their moat is massive for mobile apps.
|
| For PC + console, I think their clock is ticking. Godot has
| many disadvantages (fewer features, large performance problems,
| asset store, poor UI) but they'll eventually fix them and
| perhaps become the dominant engine. The only question is how
| much further ahead Unity will be.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| The moat is massive for console games, mobile games on Godot
| work great. We have 2 high quality Godot based mobile games
| in production on iOS/google play/steam right now.
|
| Unity has very few advantages over Godot on mobile.
| Vespasian wrote:
| 1. Congratulations to them. Godot is some great piece of open
| source software and everything that strengthens it is beneficial
| to the market segment as a whole.
|
| 2. Given the list and impact of 3rd party contributors and the
| absence of a CLA I think there is little ability for them to
| change the licensee in the future to something proprietary (nor
| is there any indication that the current key people at W4/Godot
| would want to do something like this)
|
| 3. That said, how do the venture capital companies hope that W4
| makes them back their investment and a healthy profit on top. To
| be crystal clear, there is nothing wrong with that but I would
| like have it out in the open before. "Console support" seems a
| little bit thin although I'm ready to admit that I may not know
| enough about the industry.
|
| If anyone could provide some additional information I'd be very
| thankful.
|
| Edit: personally I prefer the open stewardship model like Blender
| or the Linux foundation where it is clear that Major financial
| contributors expect to get software for their own businesses out
| of it and support an open project in order to share costs and
| have a say in the direction it takes.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Godot seems to be MIT licensed. So anyone is free to create a
| proprietary fork if they want to. I can't imagine this will be
| a problem as I suspect that the community is large enough that
| development of the OSS version would continue anyway, but the
| lack of CLA doesn't seem relevant here.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Yeah that's true.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > "Console support" seems a little bit thin
|
| Look at it this way: There's a good chance that more console
| games will be published using Godot than any other engine.
| 255kb wrote:
| Reading the FAQ it seems they are not affiliated with Godot,
| nor control any of it aspects. https://w4games.com/faq/ It
| seems they plan (https://w4games.com/products/) to make money
| by creating a BaaS/SaaS platform and selling tools to make the
| Godot games easier to port to consoles.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Thank you for pointing that out. That seems like it could be
| a profitable idea.
|
| It seems like 2 of the 4 founders are also members ins the
| Godot board of directors and if I recall W4 has a strong
| voice in the Godot development team.
|
| Maybe I'm just to pessimistic these days. (That speaks for
| Godot being a good project people care about).
| 255kb wrote:
| > It seems like 2 of the 4 founders are also members ins
| the Godot board of directors and if I recall W4 has a
| strong voice in the Godot development team.
|
| I missed that. I'm glad if Godot remains independent. VC
| funded OSS projects do not have a track record of remaining
| open-source.
| blensor wrote:
| I don't have any up to date information on the path W4 will
| go, but Juan and Remi have always been very clear that they
| have no plans to change anything in how Godot is licensed
| nor would they be able to.
|
| I did not expect W4 to get that much funding, but at it's
| current trajectory I could imagine it becoming a kind of
| publisher of Godot games. This is completely without any
| evidence, just my gut feeling.
|
| I could also see them provide the kind of SaaS backend
| tools one needs to publish a game ( Network backend,
| payments, content delivery )
| janosdebugs wrote:
| They are affiliated in as far as one of the original Godot
| authors is the one of the founders of W4 (Juan Linietsky).
| However, I think it would help avoid misunderstandings if W4
| communicated clearly how much they are dedicating to open
| source development and how much is closed source stuff only
| related to Godot.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| That would be putting the cart before the horse, no games yet
| worth porting, so obviously so, it couldn't be the reason for
| the investment.
|
| They just like the guy.
|
| He's now raised $23m publicly for the entity. Improbable said
| they raised $500m, I don't know what reality was, but I'm
| sure it was similar.
|
| It's a lot of money for sure, I wonder what risky stuff they
| will spend it on. We have a lot of options for game
| development and we also had a lot of options for multiplayer
| engineering.
|
| If you were a brilliant engineer, would you sign up for "port
| games to consoles?" I don't know. So I'm sure there's
| something really visionary behind the fundraising that hasn't
| been said publicly.
| dazaidesu wrote:
| Chicken and egg problem, no games worth porting because
| games look at the engine and are like "oh you can't do
| console? i'm out". Part of making godot an industry
| standard is first making sure it has industry standard
| capabilities.
| Hamcha wrote:
| Console support and porting effort in general is the main biz
| of some companies, the most popular being M2 (mostly emulators)
| and MP2 Games (handles Clickteam Fusion ports to console like
| Freedom Planet, Baba is You), but there are many other smaller
| studios. They mostly seem to have their own proprietary tech.
| That kinda work also can't be open source as official console
| SDKs are expensive and covered by NDAs.
|
| If the next Undertale/Minecraft gets built in Godot, W4 Games
| would be the easiest way to get that game to consoles and rack
| in tons of royalties, so I think the investment is justified
| (though hoping it doesn't poison Godot in some way)
| tormeh wrote:
| It's a decent consulting business, but where's the moat? I
| don't see the case for VC money. This seems more appropriate
| for a bank loan or something.
| starkparker wrote:
| Console porting is essentially why the Godot co-founders
| formed W4: https://w4games.com/2023/02/28/godot-support-for-
| consoles-is...
|
| > W4 Games is working on a complementary offering that is
| simpler in nature. We are developing and plan to offer fully
| middleware approved console ports for all platforms
| (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony). This will place Godot in the
| same category (and offer the same assurances) as the large
| commercial game engines.
|
| > Instead of offering porting services (which are still
| required by many developers and publishers), W4 Games will
| offer fully working console ports. These ports are intended
| to be middleware approved, meaning that the console
| manufacturer approves the port and certifies that it meets
| the required standards of quality, as well as supporting the
| full (or as close as possible) feature set of the console,
| including full integration to the console SDKs (for ease of
| development and deployment).
| blagie wrote:
| I have no insider information, and I know little about this
| transaction.
|
| However, I have done COSS business models before. This sort of
| thing is ridiculously easy to monetize. You can look at Red
| Hat, MongoDB, and many other platforms to see how this works.
| The key is usually services.
|
| Broadly, there are two types of service contracts:
|
| - Low-cost. Find developers / support people / admins / ... in
| India for $10-$100/day.
|
| - High-quality / money is not a issue. Find the best people
| (think BCG, McKinsey, law firms, boutique UX consultancies) and
| pay them $500/hour.
|
| Something like Godot is used a lot in places you wouldn't
| expect. Major video games and kids learning are the high-
| visibility uses, but there's a lot of game-like systems used in
| corporate, military, and government settings built on systems
| like Godot, Unity, and Unreal Engine.
|
| If you're developing an experimental airplane which _must_
| work, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and hinges on a
| pilot training system being developed, or you're making a
| marketing tool in a winner-takes-all-market worth a billion,
| you're very much in the later category of shops you'll
| outsource to.
|
| If you're the major developer or contributor to an open
| ecosystem, you become the go-to shop for the latter. If
| something needs fixing in the core tool to make the app you're
| developing work, you have people in-house who can fix it.
|
| A lot of these are also places with less than impressive
| competence to vet vendors (most specialize in another
| industry), and "major developer of Godot" is an easy way to not
| screw it up. It's the same reason people hire name-brand law
| firms or management consulting firms: it's not the best choice,
| but if you don't know better and need a problem solved, it's a
| safe choice.
| kdamica wrote:
| An asset store might be the fastest way to build a platform
| that makes money for them.
| jayceedenton wrote:
| I don't know anything about game engines, but always assumed that
| Godot was limited to simpler games. A lot of people seem to be
| pushing for Godot to replace Unity after the recent licensing
| shambles.
|
| Is it really possible to build games line Cities Skylines,
| Subnautica, Rust, Outer Wilds, KSP, Ori... in Godot? Is this more
| of a long term ambition at this point, or is it possible for this
| kind of game to be built in Godot today?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| From a cursory search it seems there are large games build in
| Godot. Sonic Colors: Ultimate seems to be an example.
| username256 wrote:
| It's the only example so far (if we consider this poor remake
| a "large" game). And the team behind (Blind Squirrel) didn't
| use Godot as-is, they had to rewrite most of the core
| graphics area.
|
| It will be a while until we see AA / AAA games in Godot, it's
| missing too much right now to be viable in the 3D space
| (again, for AA/AAA. For indies, sure, why not). One day,
| certainly, I hope so, but not today nor tomorrow.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I think no large games use an engine as-is, they will
| always extend and change it in some ways to make it fit
| their game. Besides the question was not about AA/AAA
| games. Unity also did not fill that segment. The question
| was whether Godot will be able to fill the space Unity has.
| And I don't think it can currently. But with more
| development it definitely could. The last time I used unity
| I was very appalled by how bad it actually was, I admit
| this is something like 5 years ago but I doubt it has
| changed.
| Kelteseth wrote:
| To replace Unity? Yes, and if there is something missing, you
| just clone Godot and fix it yourself. I can compile the whole
| engine in 2 minutes. There are currently some limitations for
| AAA games in the rendering pipeline, see Clay John's nice talk
| about this, from the last Godot con[1]. For example, at the
| company I work for we use Godot 4 to recreate Google Earth with
| OSM data :)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW3IFMvDTCY
| dash2 wrote:
| > if there is something missing, you just clone Godot and fix
| it yourself
|
| "just"?
| Kelteseth wrote:
| Well, I mean source code is easier to read that Unreal. And
| Unity does not even provide source code, so you have to
| wait until they fix the issue for you. In addition, the
| Godot community is really helpful, if you provide an
| example project with your problem.
| Karliss wrote:
| Unity sells source code access, it's in the "contact us
| for quote" category. But that's how many B2B services
| work, including some of the most widely used commercial
| game middleware.
|
| Also large portion of first party Unity subsystems which
| you install through builtin package manger (I am not
| talking about third party asset store stuff) is available
| in source code form under relatively nonrestrictive Unity
| Companion License to anyone. Don't need the Enterprise
| plan or additional payments for that. For those modules
| you can not only read and modify the source code, but you
| can even openly distribute your modified versions. The
| biggest restriction of this license is that you can only
| use that source code in combination with Unity, you can't
| port it to different engines. And in many cases where I
| read it, to better understand how to correctly use the
| library or avoid a bug, it was quite readable.
|
| So overall access to source code isn't the main obstacle
| for game developers to fix the problem in Unity, spending
| time fixing things and afterwards maintaining a modified
| version is.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I have personally had issues where I wanted to read the
| Unity source code but couldn't. And I suspect it wouldn't
| have been worth the cost in my case. There's really no
| substitute for shared source. Truly open source isn't
| necessarily better; modifying it is not often realistic,
| but having to pay just to read it is a big stumbling
| block.
| gkbrk wrote:
| Much easier than waiting for a suitable job opening at
| Unity, getting a job at Unity, and then just cloning Unity
| and fixing things yourself.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Oh yeah, haven't you heard? All open source software is
| intrinsically flawless because you can _just_ fork it.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I think patching a game engine is fairly common in the
| industry. Games are not on a dependency update treadmill.
| They pick a version, and barring some external crisis,
| there is no reason to upgrade anything ever. If there is
| one bug affecting rendering or speed from the underlying
| engine, it can be worth finding it yourself.
| Macha wrote:
| Unity itself was once seen as the "mobile and hobbyist
| platform" compared to "big kid engines" like frostbite,
| cryengine and unreal.
|
| I think Godot is there, and they are seeing the start of
| adoption by AAA devs even before the Unity licensing
| shenanigans. But as Unity's own rise shows, it's not going to
| be a matter of flipping a switch and having comparable share
| amongst big games tomorrow.
|
| It's probably also worth mentioning that it's possible to build
| pretty much any game in any framework, or without, it's just a
| matter of time and effort. Like LWJGL still is seen as a "toy"
| framework despite being in one of the most successful video
| games of all time (Minecraft). Factorio used just Allegro as a
| layer on top of SDL before migrating to bare SDL2. Conversely,
| many of the technical problems for KSP1 or Cities Skylines 2
| have been attributed to Unity being a poor fit, despite being
| widely recognised as having "made it" into the "real engines"
| tier. There were also some EA developers with not very nice
| things to say about frostbite for games that don't look like
| Battlefield in the era where EA was pushing for all their devs
| to adopt it.
| Vespasian wrote:
| I wonder whether that is because most games are projects with
| a clear endpoint after which development mostly stops.
|
| That allows developers to experiment a little bit (internally
| or with smaller projects) and hedge their bets.
|
| If there is language compatibility (e.g. C# ) and your
| reusable components are somewhat sensibly designed (if only
| to mitigate update risks in your initial engine) it's
| feasible to think about switching for your next game (unless
| say in with service product that is expected to run
| indefinitely)
| Macha wrote:
| The counterpoint to this is many studios are sequel
| factories, or producing games that are at least broadly in
| the same genre continuously, and each game starts as a fork
| of the last, which is how you end up with things like the
| COD engine or Source 2 having a direct lineage to engines
| from 90s quake games. So "Assassins Creed: Odyssey" may not
| be an ongoing service, but "Assassins Creed" is, and tech
| carries forward from one to the next.
| zenbowman wrote:
| Exactly. I used Unity starting from almost the first release,
| and attended Unite in 2007.
|
| Unity was seen as a hobby engine then, we used it for the
| web, but for desktop used Unreal. Godot today is way ahead of
| where Unity was in 2007ish.
| mattlondon wrote:
| As far as I am aware, there is nothing intrinsically preventing
| people using it.
|
| I have no experience in building big titles or even commercial
| games, but I see no obvious "blockers" to building a large and
| complex 3d game. It's not like Godot itself limits you to only
| doing basic 2d platformers or whatever - it seems as flexible
| and power as unity.
|
| Sure you might not have all the same eye candy as the very
| latest unreal engine or whatever, so AAA quality titles might
| be out, and I am not sure what the multiplayer stack is like,
| but it seems like the fundamentals are there and so there is
| nothing to hold people back.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Is it really possible to build games line Cities Skylines,
| Subnautica, Rust, Outer Wilds, KSP, Ori... in Godot? Is this
| more of a long term ambition at this point, or is it possible
| for this kind of game to be built in Godot today?
|
| This might be a bit silly, but when it comes to engines and
| tools in regards to graphical fidelity and larger projects, I
| like to think of it in 3 broad categories: *
| Impossible - you're not making the next Crysis in GameMaker,
| Construct, or RPG Maker. Period. * Unviable - you could
| technically rip out and replace 50% of jMonkeyEngine or NeoAxis
| with something more performant and better, if you had near-
| unlimited resources; except we both know it's not happening.
| * Viable - you could take an off-the-shelf engine like Unity or
| Unreal and with a large amount of work achieve your goals, with
| varying degrees of success.
|
| Godot was strictly in the "unviable" group during its 2.X and
| 3.X releases, but is getting better now (new renderer, nice LOD
| functionality, good C# support in addition to GDScript when you
| don't want to program gameplay in C++) and thanks to community
| efforts missing functionality is also getting added (like the
| terrain plugins, the older of which were sometimes quite
| broken): https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset It still
| doesn't have that big of a commercial ecosystem around it (like
| Unity does) and still feels a bit half baked at times and
| getting the same things you could get out of Unity or Unreal
| working would take more work for larger projects... but it
| feels more and more doable.
|
| Then again, currently Godot is hands down better for smaller
| projects, a lot of indie games, game jam games and quick
| prototyping, both Unity and Unreal feel too sluggish and
| heavyweight for that (and Unity in particular is a mess because
| of the whole legacy pipeline/URP/HDRP situation, DOTS, multiple
| input systems, multiple UI solutions and just so much
| fragmentation). Not every game needs to have the scale of the
| ones previously listed, actually most don't and should better
| manage their scope and could still be wildly successful.
|
| Overall, it feels trending upwards and I'm curious to see where
| Godot will be in 5-10 years. If you tried right now, you'd just
| have all the normal early adopter struggles.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I would guess medium term, short term if there's a specific
| roadblock that happens to get a lot of attention. My
| understanding is that Unity's got certain things in a more
| sophisticated but less elegant form, where Godot seems to want
| to do everything 'correctly' even if it imposes performance
| penalties.
|
| Making Godot, less 'klugey' but less performant.
|
| The trouble with maximizing Unity the way professional devs do,
| is that you have to know which kluges to use and which to
| avoid. It's somewhat impractical and the end result still isn't
| that awesome: some of those games you mention are hitting a
| performance wall even though they're in Unity.
|
| I don't think Godot is really on par with Unity in the 3d
| performant space in all respects, but I think that could change
| quickly, and what _will_ happen is that it 'll catch up over
| the medium term without going totally klugey. I'd give it a
| couple years to get there. Right now I think you'd have to
| design around what's not currently performant enough.
| omneity wrote:
| I hope for Godot to remain true to itself over time. Unity was
| the indie upstart at one point, just like Godot is now.
|
| Penpot/Figma story all over ... I hope not.
| CodeSgt wrote:
| Unity was never FOSS. Nor was Figma, to my knowledge
| 255kb wrote:
| I find the title rather confusing, as, after reading their FAQ
| (https://w4games.com/faq/) it is clear that they don't own Godot.
| They are building a traditional BaaS for gaming, specifically
| targeted at Godot developers (and they may contribute to Godot
| development, which doesn't make a real difference rearding
| ownership).
| Macha wrote:
| The W4 founders are the project founders and many of the top
| contributors to Godot Engine. Godot has always done what for me
| is the right thing for the continued open source nature of the
| project, including limiting any organisation's members on the
| leadership committee, assigning trademark rights to a
| foundation and not naming their company Godot Engine, LLC
| (unlike, say, Gitea).
|
| So structurally it's the safest open source project against a
| future source available pivot, but there are some concerns such
| as the separation of the Godot foundation from it's parent
| organisation or a "de facto control" fork.
|
| I think on the other hand, they do have a more clear selling
| point vs do it yourself on the open source projects. For IP
| reasons, console manufacturers don't permit the console
| integration part to be open source, so that's the bit that W4
| has that the open source project can never compete with (though
| other companies building on the open source project could of
| course build their own).
| 255kb wrote:
| Thank you for the precision. I guess the important part is
| how Godot is currently organized and remains independent.
| dazaidesu wrote:
| They donate a lot of code back to the engine, w4 has already
| contributed an entire directx renderer to the engine that they
| needed to build out for their console porting efforts anyway.
| famahar wrote:
| Hoping for Godot to be the Blender of game development engines
| one day.
| Sirikon wrote:
| Great, now Godot has a time bomb as well.
| wg0 wrote:
| "Investors"
| definitelyhuman wrote:
| Great to see more support for Godot! The lead VC and the company
| pledges bode well for keeping the bulk of the new tech open I
| think.
|
| Biggest red flag is the lack of anyone with games pedigree. If
| the goal is to crack the duopoly with a great FOSS engine
| supported by paid BaaS + enterprise support plans, you're going
| to need strong connections, partners, and knowledge of the real
| product requirements. First sales will be pretty challenging, but
| if they can get traction and ship great games there's certainly
| an opportunity
| wg0 wrote:
| I'm not affiliated with the channel and they probably don't even
| know I'm posting here but this[0] is a great entry point into
| Godot Engine although I think the instruction style leads for it
| to be more general and applicable to other engines or what a game
| engine actually facilitates.
|
| Great stuff.
|
| [0]. https://youtu.be/nAh_Kx5Zh5Q
| dgellow wrote:
| Congratulations, that's a pretty impressive feat. It's fantastic
| to see how fast things are developing. I may be wrong but the
| current momentum to develop viable alternatives to the big
| proprietary engines feels real and not just based on hype. We may
| reach a point in a few years where Blender + Godot are basically
| the go-to option for small to medium size studio, which is crazy
| to think about given the state of game dev just 10-15 years ago.
|
| At the same time I find it hard to not feel cynical when I see
| that much money invested by a VC firm into an open source
| project.
|
| I wish the best to the Godot team, so far they have a been pretty
| good at leading the project.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Godot is awesome, but I wish that when people start ambitious new
| projects that are meant to last for decades they'd choose a
| language that has more modern conveniences than C++. The compile
| times suck. The language is such a complicated mess you have to
| basically ban whole parts of the language from being used in the
| project to make development palatable. I would even prefer C to
| C++. I know Rust is probably a hard sell though.
| dualogy wrote:
| I'm guessing once Zig is at 1.x (breaking changes before then),
| "real contenders" for C++ engines might shape up to on-par
| within the first few years of that point. (I mean the subset of
| such projects without prior or subsequent abandonment.)
|
| > I would even prefer C to C++
|
| Assuming you want to game-dev not engine-dev, the above is
| quite the doable rule for your "C++" codebase under your own
| oversight and maintenance even though including some C++ engine
| and calling its APIs, right? (Apart from the fact that some-
| not-all of them expose some capi `.h`s from what I've seen.)
|
| Most of them might (assuming here I know) anyway tend toward
| the lean-and-mean none-too-OOP way of doing things, data-
| oriented designs etc.
|
| My (newbie) C++ is C (structs + funcs) but with struct methods
| and occasional light inheritance, aka Go-like (methods and
| embeds). The std::string too seems alright-enough right now
| (vs. a hand-rolled slice-of-T-being-uint8_t struct-making
| macro) as long as there's no mass string handlings going on, in
| which case it'll have to be evaluated more seriously.
| bbkane wrote:
| I think Godot started before Rust took off, so they didn't have
| better alternatives then. The jury is still out on whether
| other C++ competition has any staying power, and even Rust
| still has some deficiencies compared to C++
| numlock86 wrote:
| Godot is great. I am afraid it's still a very long way before
| they become for game development what Blender is for 3D modelling
| these days. If it will even happen at all. So any improvement and
| funding is more than welcome.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I am afraid it's still a very long way before they become for
| game development what Blender is for 3D modelling these days
|
| Makes sense. Blender is coming up to being 30 years old soon,
| and it still isn't heavily embedded into the mainstream
| pipelines, but it's getting closer every day.
|
| By contrast, Godot is about 10 years old, but still has eaten
| some of Unity's pie. Cannot wait to see how Godot is in about
| 20 years, surely they will have surpassed Unity at that point
| :)
| Thaxll wrote:
| Godot has not eaten anything significant from Unity, like
| nothing at all.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yes, it has. But game engine adoption takes time, it's not
| immediately clear that it is eating some of Unity's lunch,
| as games have to be developed, launched and appreciated
| before it's obvious for the average (developer) person.
|
| Look at some of the games that made Unity popular in the
| first place, and the people/companies that made them. Lots
| of them are moving to Godot now, but again, it'll take time
| before those people/companies launch the games.
| blagie wrote:
| Serious / non-leading / non-rhetorical question: What are the
| gaps?
| PrivateButts wrote:
| From the perspective of a hobby unity dev who's making a jam
| game in Godot to feel it out, Godot has a lot of rough edges,
| weird choices, and stuff that's just missing.
|
| Stuff that I've encountered so far:
|
| - A very annoying issue where the editor will lock up after
| my Linux laptop wakes up from sleep. I've lost work because
| I've closed the laptop without remembering to close Godot
| first.
|
| - Performance issues with large assets or too many assets. A
| single pixel art asset pack ([LimeZu's Modern
| Interiors](https://limezu.itch.io/moderninteriors)) brought
| Godot to its knees until I pruned it. The large tilemaps in
| there will also slow the tilemap editor to a crawl.
|
| - I've been struggling with getting the dynamic tilemap rules
| to behave as expected. YMMV
|
| - I'm not a fan of Godot's single-window UI approach,
| especially when it comes to scripting. You can futz with
| editor settings to make this slightly better, though.
|
| - You can't mix 2d and 3d stuff like you can in Unity, and
| the 3d side of things is way rougher than 2d.
|
| - They're still working out what direction to take with an
| Asset store.
|
| - The shift from Unity's GameObject>Component model to
| Godot's single script per node approach has been an awkward
| adjustment for me. I keep replicating the old model by making
| prefab nodes that are basically just components.
|
| - I miss Unity's play mode scene inspector. Godot is halfway
| there. You can poke around in the scene tree, but you don't
| see that update in the editor.
|
| - The collision system isn't as straightforward as Unity
|
| - It'd be nice if we had a bit of a slot system like we have
| with Vue Components for when we nest things under packed
| scenes.
|
| The good stuff:
|
| - There's only one type of signal/callback instead of the
| three different systems Unity can use. The signaling system
| is well-implemented instead of feeling bolted on.
|
| - Godot doesn't differentiate between a Scene and a Prefab
| like Unity does. It avoids the don't destroy on load juggling
| you have to do and gives you a bit more control
|
| - Some neat shortcuts for boilerplate stuff are built into
| the editor. For example, if you're adding SFX, you often want
| to provide several similar SFX clips to provide variety. When
| you set the SFX in the editor, you can assign a Randomizer to
| it, which takes a list of SFX and plays them randomly based
| on the weights and mode you set. You can even set pitch and
| volume adjustments to add even more variety.
|
| - The fire-and-forget tween system is very convenient.
|
| A lot of people compare Godot to Blender. It's not at the
| level that Blender is at now, but it does give me Blender
| pre-2.5 vibes- A solid base for enthusiasts that can be honed
| into polished software for the masses. I hope that Godot
| glows up the same way.
| blagie wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| As relevant to Godot, most of my work is with kids (as
| relevant here on both ends -- teaching kids to code, and
| making educational activities). I haven't used either Godot
| or Unity much, and was trying to decide. For a variety of
| reasons, open-source is a huge win*, so I was leaning that
| way.
|
| I don't expect much 3d or to be doing too many things which
| are overly fancy. Much more on the "weekend hack" or "kids
| afterschool activity" side of things, and much less on the
| serious game development side.
|
| From your list, it doesn't sound like there are (m)any
| showstoppers to just picking Godot.
|
| * (1) Avoids licensing issues installing / uninstalling on
| classrooms full of computers (2) Advanced kids can learn
| more, since they can look under the hood (3) Guaranteed
| long-term support (kids activities are sometimes not
| updated for a while) (4) Automatic FERPA / COPPA compliance
| and proper handling of student data. ...and the list goes
| on for quite a while longer.
| tetha wrote:
| From my own adventures into Godot, for that use case, I'd
| recommend using Godot very much.
|
| If you know some basics, you can whip up a simple
| platformer, top down game, old-school top down shooter
| and such very, very quickly. A decent tutorial can have
| you at at something functional on the screen in half an
| hour or so. And then you can start playing around to make
| it cooler.
|
| All while teaching kids some basics of programming.
| blagie wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I haven't used it much, but that was my first impression.
| It's good to see it confirmed.
| johnwoods wrote:
| Congratulations to the Godot team! I have used Godot a lot in the
| past and can't wait to replace my Unity junk.
| Andrex wrote:
| Godot
|
| Blender
|
| OpenToonz
|
| GIMP
|
| I hope all these major open source projects reach their
| potential. Blender is already basically there, and I'm expecting
| the rest to catch up eventually. Even GIMP -- it really just
| needs some TLC and actual funding and it could easily start on
| the notoriety/attention path Godot's been on for a few years now.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| GIMP seems actively hostile to giving people what they want: a
| Photoshop clone. Even projects which would revamp the interface
| to be more Photoshop like were given the cold shoulder.
|
| At this point I have fully switched to Krita. I am not a real
| artist and am only ever making little doodles for my apps, but
| the developers seem more in tune with what users need.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _giving people what they want: a Photoshop clone_
|
| If that was _really_ what people wanted, wouldn't there be a
| successful fork by now?
| Andrex wrote:
| There have been a lot of forks. Cinepaint, Gimpshop and
| Glimpse (RIP) come to mind.
|
| Unfortunately the reality is if people can barely pay
| attention and contribute to Gimp, what chance do any forks
| have?
|
| Gimp moves slowly but they do listen to their users. Lack
| of funding is more responsible for any complaints people
| have with Gimp, not some assumed "anti-Photoshop" idealism.
| ksclarke wrote:
| Because people (i.e., users) aren't the same thing as
| developers. Most people just want to use a tool, rather
| than develop it.
| teddyh wrote:
| Developers are _most often_ also users. This is
| _especially_ true for free software.
| pg5 wrote:
| My issue with Godot is that I am bad at art. With Unity, I could
| affordably get pretty much ready to go assets and build a game,
| but with Godot, I don't know of any equivalent marketplaces.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| IIRC the standard Unity Assets store license does allow using
| assets in other engines. And maybe you also wanna check out
| KenneyNL if you are looking for open assets for various small
| stuff.
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