With 4.0 getting more and more advanced features [0] and Unity merging with an Ad company [1], Godot is looking like it could be an attractive proposition for a lot of Unity shops.
Godot is really cool, but a clear and publicly delineated path to console distribution (and not "go talk to these guys", as they currently do) is going to be necessary to get material interest out of most of the gamedev space.
It's definitely Godot's opportunity to drive a lot of adoption, I'm seeing a ton of disgust from a lot of indie devs I follow, and looking for alternatives to Unity now.
As much as I'd like to use Godot, there are two features missing that I really don't think I could do without:
- Asset store. I totally get it, handling payments, curating, etc. are a huge task... but man, I'm a coder, and I don't have the funds to pay an artist or a musician full time. Being able to just go buy a pack of trees for $20 or something is a huge timer saver.
- Animation re-targeting. It seems like there's a 3rd party plugin for this but it also seems like it hasn't been updated in a year. In unity I can buy a big pack of animations for pretty cheap and reuse it on almost all my humanoid characters. That's huge. I think this can be done in Blender or Maya, but it's so seamless in the engine compared to using a 3rd party tool.
> - Asset store. I totally get it, handling payments, curating, etc. are a huge task... but man, I'm a coder, and I don't have the funds to pay an artist or a musician full time. Being able to just go buy a pack of trees for $20 or something is a huge timer saver.
Heh I mentioned this in another Godot thread a few days ago. It sounds like a potential YC funded startup for anyone inclined and something that could be with the knowledge and collaboration of the core maintainers of Godot as a simple means to fund Godot.
I absolutely understand the upsides of the assets store. Although not as expansive as the asset store, there are lots of either free or extremely affordable; many of them with CC0 licenses or licenses that make them extremely easy to just use them. I wouldn't have been able to make my first game in Godot Puck Fantasy (available here: <https://www.lowkeyart.com/puckfantasy>) without them!
I would encourage you to try some of these! You'd be surprised how far you can get by using these, with and without modification.
These are my favorite resources, in order of preference.
- <https://www.kenney.nl/> is by far the best one and most expansive one. Everything he creates is CC0. A lot of great free assets available on his site. He also has a "Kenney Game Assets All-in-1" which can be bought on itch.io for $19.95. It has all assets he's ever made, neatly organized, and ready to use. All CC0. This also includes some music. The music and sound assets are much more limited than the 2D and 3D assets, but it's there, and it's solid.
- <https://kaylousberg.com/game-assets> has some fantastic assets also available for free, and has more available for a pretty affordable Patreon tier. Also has a CC0 license for the free assets. Mostly a specific style, which is great for consistency, but a bit more limited than the wide variety of Kenney; but I don't doubt that with time they'll build an equally strong library of assets.
- <https://quaternius.com/> has many free great assets. Also CC0. Has a high variety of styles and settings. Also has a very affordable Patreon to get easy access to everything they produce.
If you're just talking about some models or sprites, can't you just buy them wherever in any file format Godot supports and import them? Ok, you might have to spend a bit of time wrapping them in Godot's nodes, but it seems like that would be quick and trivial
Indeed. People think of Unity as a game engine and it's really not. Unity is a service provider, whose major services is the asset store, analytics, ad platform, and so forth. The game engine and editor is just the hook. Most long-term Unity developers have a toolkit of assets that massively overhaul the engine, anyhow; and Unity leans into that.
Godot is an interesting engine and editor, but that's not enough to make me switch. Show me the ecosystem of services and tools that surround it, and how _utterly trivial_ they are to access, and I might consider switching.
I've been using Godot for hobby projects on-and-off for a while now, and overall I vastly prefer it to Unity. The scene hierarchy of Godot is a better mental model (for me) than the GameObject/MonoBehavior ever was.
That said, I have a _few_ items that I think are absolute showstoppers for solo-dev side projects.
1. The asset pipeline is simply not as clean as Unity's. The ability to drop a .blend file in the project in Unity is so underrated. In Godot FBX imports are unreliable, texture imports misbehave frequently, and rigging goes wrong even in the recommended file formats. There's a lot less clarity around the path to getting real assets in game, which can be a major pain point for solo devs.
2. Along the same lines, there is no equivalent of Unity's mecanim. With Unity, if you can model and rig a character in Blender, you can pull free mocap or other animations from the asset store and get to work. In Godot you're still best off authoring your own animations for each character. This drastically increases the amount of time spent making assets.
3. Godot is in a weird spot version wise for anyone who wants to use C#; the beta version of 4.0 is rapidly approaching, and guarantees to break any project you start in 3.x --- but 4.0 still doesn't come built with C# support. Hopefully this gets resolved soon.
> One is an industry behemoth and the world’s most popular game engine, while the other is a free, 30 megabyte program developed by passionate developers in their free time.
I was under the impression that Godot had at least two full-time devs working on it. Between their patreon revenue and the grants they've received they can definitely afford a small team on payroll. It's still important to stress the comparison in scope between Unity and Godot, but the latter is definitely more than a hobby project at this point.
That's a good point, I can edit that for clarity in the article (especially since I mentioned Godot's Patreon support later in the article). I was assuming that the Patreon support didn't amount to full time support for all the devs that contribute, but I don't know if that's true or not.
Either way, it seems a lot of people have contributed without sponsorship, but the main devs are (hopefully) compensated.
The problem with Godot is still it's age, and the lack of proven projects which many people are working on at once.
Myself and plenty of others at small or above size studios would have to make a huge leap into Godot and hope you don't run into any scaling issues. Not just from a project point of view, but integration on the artistic side.
LTS versions of Unity despite the known "un-fun" of it, are stable in a sense. Godot is moving fast, that isn't always a good thing for stability.
I'd love to jump on the new shiny and fun engine! But having to make the definitive choice for a company to make their next project in? Unfortunately just isn't there yet. "It's fun as a dev" just isn't a compelling argument for literally everyone else who isn't the engineer, compared to the number of all size studio pumping out Unity projects(Some even being successful!).
Do you think Blender overcame this challenge, or is it still a sticking point in the VFX industry? I know they're at very different levels of maturity but I'm curious if the open projects ended up helping with ironing out these kinks.
I'm very much a hobbyist gamedev, mostly doing small personal projects or game jams when I have the time.
I switched from Unity to Godot in 2016 when 2.0 came out and I haven't looked back since. I find Godot fits so nicely with how I like to make things compared to Unity or Unreal. It has that comfy feeling like Aesprite, sxfr, and bosca ceoil where the tool itself has an artistic expression.
I agree with most downsides that people have in regards to Godot, lacking asset store, lacking in the amount of tutorials compared to other engine, lacking in completed titles at scale, etc.
However for my purposes I've never found these to be a deal breaker, and if anything I prefer being part of the smaller community that Godot has - it feels more grassroots and aligned with my personal values.
>You can also use C#’s events, which are strongly typed, but if you need to interface with node events, you should use Godot’s signal system.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope, I wasted 2 hours of my life trying to get these signals to work in GD script.
I'm going to try some other open source engines, but trying to jerry-rig an extra language on top of a relatively immature engine isn't a very good idea.
Now I imagine if Microsoft decided to come out of an engine, they could rationalize supporting six or seven languages. But if you're already a small project, what ends up happening is the other language support just isn't as good
Unity is suffering because it can't find a way to make DOTS/ECS first class without completely redoing basically everything.
That's my biggest complaint with Unity at this point. So much is built around the GameObject implementation that when you start using ECS you can feel the friction - you're writing a lot more code, you're doing things in a way that feel like swimming upstream, and there's less support + documentation.
How does Godot compare? Are highly threaded features out of the box? I would use Unreal but the C# Unreal interfaces I've seen are very immature.
If you're doing high-end 3D stuff, Godot 3.x will probably disappoint you anyway.
If you're doing graphically simple games with a complex simulation under the hood (everyone loves RimWorld as an example), then you don't really benefit from an ECS that's tightly integrated with the engine. You just do all that stuff however you want, and use the engine as an I/O layer.
Godot also seems to be built in a way that creates friction for ECS style game logic. It's built around scenes that are trees of nodes that each have associated behavior and signaling/message passing between nodes.
Godot uses a similar object oriented approach as Unity. For ECS, you might keep an eye on Bevy[1]. It’s still not mature but its team has been making progress. Even Unity and Unreal had to start somewhere.
What's wrong with .NET core? It's the future of .NET afaik and it has multiplatform support and it's open source.
> .NET (Core) -- A cross-platform and open source implementation of .NET, rethought for the cloud age while remaining significantly compatible with .NET Framework. Used for Linux, macOS, and Windows apps.[0]
> At first glance, Unity is so laughably ahead of Godot in sheer number of features supported that it seems comical to compare the two.
> In practice, Unity requires 3rd party tools for tweens, timers, and networking, all of which Godot includes out-of-the-box. Still, I’d argue that it doesn’t actually matter for the vast majority of us indie game developers.
The quoted statement is 100% accurate. Unity is very slow. When I worked on Unity with a larger project, I'd often have to wait 10+ seconds for Unity to rescan the entire project every time I switched windows from my IDE to Unity, or every time I ran the project. In similar project sizes, Godot was always lightning fast.
> Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.
Unity does have more features - like more obscure 3D features - but that has nothing to do with how Unity deems it necessary to rescan the project tree all the time. Also, when I used Unity, I never used these extra features, so even if this were true, how come all users have to pay the price for features that only a few of us will use?
Honestly, core Godot is very full-featured, and in my experience the central abstractions are much better thought out than those in Unity. I feel a lot of the FUD around "Unity has more features than Godot" comes from people that like seeing a long list of features, not from people who actually need those features.
Anecdotally, there's something about Godot's structure that just "clicks" better for me. It's odd because they seem pretty similar on the surface (nested scene graph, nodes with scripts that have hooks, etc), so it's hard to determine what exactly makes it easier to understand.
The only two concrete things I can point to are better documentation (IMO), and the first-class signal/observer support in Godot. I'm not sure if that exists in Unity or not, but it's a really intuitive way to handle entity interaction, and I think that makes it way more easy for beginners to get started.
It is outrageously painful. Half of the craft of working in Unity is knowing which kinds of operations will trigger a 15 minute re-import and basically scheduling your day so that you have other things you can do while that’s happening. It doesn’t happen every day or every time you open a project, but sometimes you’ll be looking at your master branch in git, and then you go to check out a branch where something big has changed, and then you alt-tab back to Unity and… time to go make a fresh pot of coffee.
I switched to Unreal after using Unity for many years, both at my day jobs and as an indie. If I had known what it is actually like to work in Unreal, rather than how the grapevine vaguely typecasts it, I would have switched a long time ago, or more likely never used Unity in the first place. Unreal is a delight.
It's unfortunate that Epic ever let Unity persuade people that it's better suited to anything or anyone at all.
It's very true; I remember one game I was working on, when you pulled down the code and new assets it'd take a long time to rebuild the "Library" (which is not something you can check in). And sometimes, if your version of the project was acting wonky and everyone else was fine, the solution was to delete the Library and rebuild it from scratch. If you were doing it from scratch, it could take hours. They've made some improvements but it's still a mess.
The editor itself always seems very buggy. If you have the "Console" open (which you will if you're coding), it's pretty much guaranteed you're going to see a lot of random errors that have nothing to do with even your code. A lot of them don't even make sense or could be ignored. Like you'll get weird asset import errors if you upgrade versions, but a lot of times they're just red herrings and not important. There's also a lot of QOL stuff that's very frustrating, like arrays being annoying to edit (I'm not sure if they've fixed this yet or not). It's also easy to accidentally brick your editor on your own, with debugger shenanigans or loops that don't end.
Also, if you're trying to build a an editor extension, omg was that a nightmare. Just getting things like Undo/Redo and object serialization working correctly are difficult and in some cases impossible. And frankly, you need extensions for a lot of things to actually be useful, like until recently the builtin terrain editor was basically useless, and you have things like Odin because the builtin inspector is a nightmare.
There's a lot to like about Unity, but there's also a huge amount of pain points with it.
This seems to be a cyclical thing. Every now and then a new solution shows up that is built on new development and UX practices, abandons some baggage that is no longer relevant to most users, makes assumptions in its design that are better suited to the era, etc etc.
Then ten or twenty years pass and it becomes the thing to replace.
I'd say that yes, at least in the last 5 or so years.
I decided to make a scene which would contain a single copy of every single model that I'd like to use in a project of mine, for checking the textures, how lighting works, the scale of everything etc.
By the time I got to around 200 different objects (no high poly ones, by the way), it took like a minute to just open that scene.
I’m in the midst of making a 2d game in monogame and was toying with switching to Unity, thanks for sharing this. Man I wish I could find some resources on how to do 2d shaders in monogame though, like making sprites wave in the wind/water without needing a ton of sprite frames, hard to find this kind of thing.
People are overreacting to Unity's acquisition (technically a merger) of ironSource and Riccitiello's comments on monetization. Many developers want to make money from their games, so I think it's positive and worthwhile for Unity to give them tools to do that. As for Unity's market cap, the market as a whole has taken a beating over the past few months. As someone who works with Unity and sees the enormous value it provides, it just strikes me as a great time to buy their stock while it's low.
Ironsource is a malware vendor. I'm not sure in what sense you think people are overreacting, but I think that fact alone is worthy of a raised eyebrow or two. Unity has merged with a malware vendor.
I tend to agree, but I do really worry about Unity's technical roadmap. There are so many half-baked systems that rarely get updates, 3 confusing choices of render pipeline, and there's not robust well-utilized implementations of common gameplay elements like Unreal has.
Excited to try Godot in a couple of years when it's more mature. Hopefully they can be the Blender of game engines – where it started rough and now is better than Maya or other alternatives.
Do you have an actual specific disagreement with c# or are you just venting because you are not familiar with the language?
C# is a robust language with a lot of features like lambdas pattern matching etc. I also find that most of the people who know Swift are Apple developers, so I feel like there isn't a broad enough appeal especially for game devs who are going to be more Windows or Linux centric.
C# is really well suited to the task thanks to value types and structs, that gives you back control of memory that is lost in Java for example. It also has a lot of syntax sugar to avoid being too verbose and the memory safety and GC are desirable most of the time and can be avoided with well known tricks, like object pools, when performance needs are more paramount.
Godot's default language is GDscript, which is similar to Python. I'd highly recommend that to new people switching to Godot. I think C# is just cruft for people coming from Unity and stuck in old habits/frameworks.
C# isn't the worst but out of the newer languages I've tried it's probably the one I'm least excited to write. Swift or Kotlin would definitely be preferred.
You obviously know this since you linked a Swift bindings project, but for others reading who may not be aware: Godot officially supports multiple languages ("GDScript, C#, VisualScript, and C++ and C via its GDNative technology"[1]), but other languages are supported by the community.
I’ve actually read so many good things about C# lately here and on Reddit that I plan to start learning it in the coming weeks (other reasons include .Net and F# being an adjacent language)
C# hasn't been an issue for me at all bar a few oddities. Some things not working properly in C# (think some plugins or something back a while ago). Some code not directly mapping from GDScript to C#, causing huge object count issues. For reference, I've been using it since 3.1 in a hobby context.
Really, it's not the developers you have to worry about. It's everyone else. Godot is made with developers in mind, but there's much more to do than wiring signals and writing code. If you can't map things one to one from a different program or close to that through a plugin, you're either giving yourself more work, or forcing not just developers, but artists to relearn processes too.
> If you can't map things one to one from a different program or close to that through a plugin
I've only used Godot in a hobby context, but the full on C# support compared to other engines is pretty amazing. Just as a proof of concept I imported an open source C# library I've worked on that's designed to play old DOS music formats, created a small wrapper node with control functions, and I was able to control it as expected from within GDScript nodes right out of the box. Only issue I would have seen down the road would be cross-platform compatibility since the library itself was Windows only.
Caveat: I can't say I've ever got far enough in Unity to say if the C# support is of a similar scope. Godot just "clicks" better for me, so I've gotten way farther with it than anything I've done in Unity.
I'm so happy that I saw this coming and have been head first in master branch in order to be ahead of the curve. I have lots of things to learn still in 4 but I see clean piplines using latest formats like dynamic gltf in scene reload, meaning direct blender(et al)-godot pipelines. Global illum is so off the charts pretty. Perf is a pain point but when you start using multimeshinstances things make more sense. Updates sometimes corrupt scenes, keep your source of truth models in gltf 2. Shader language wizards are the future. Vulkan is the coolest thing since sliced bread.
Context: My game project has been going since 2013, on godot since 2018.
Seriously curious to those in the gamedev community: how does Unity acquiring an ad company materially effect the feature set and platform that Unity currently provides? Is it one of those "Unity has been going downhill in slow-mo for years now and this investment is proof that they aren't interested in fixing real issues that indie devs have--writing's on the wall..." type of thing? From the outside, just seems like business as usual to me... I genuinely don't understand the pull people feel to entirely retool simply because Unity wants to do ads better. What am I missing?
As a dev that uses Unity on a daily basis, here is my perspective.
If this was simply a matter of "Unity wants to do ads better" and they purchased an adtech company, I doubt there would be much discussion about it. That is not what happened. ironSource is not just an adtech company but a company that has built and distributed software that has been classified as malware by Sophos and Microsoft Essentials[1].
While this may be an overdramatic take, once ironSource is fully integrated with Unity and we update to the latest LTS version that includes ironSource software, I expect that we will want to virus scan our own executables built through Unity. I do not trust ironSource nor do I trust any software that integrates with it.
Now, putting the malware concern aside, I also see this as a step in the wrong direction for Unity. There are MANY uses for Unity that are not games, that will never have ads, and that will never utilize anything from this acquisition. The concern here is that recent updates of Unity have made some of these features such that you cannot disable them.
To me, this is yet another poor decision by the Unity team. As an aside, I recently started looking into their freshly released new Analytics platform and it is an absolute mess of a release. There are massive oversights in the implementation and bugs that prevent workarounds to those oversights.
Unity is not looking like software worth betting your company's future on. At best, it is looking more like prototyping software before using a better engine.
As someone who has a mortgage and children to feed ... Unity acquiring an ad company is encouraging. For years now Unity seemed to be lost and directionless; having them merge with an ad company shows that they're serious about focusing on creating a product that will help developers turn a profit.
But you won't hear many "indie" developers say as much, because making money is uncool.
That said, IronSource is sketchy as hell. I'm more concerned about _who_ they merged with then that it was an ad company.
I was really tempted to try out the c# support but I opted first for the rust godot bindings and then the nim bindings. Nim is working fantastically. I was a bit worried because the bindings are not really actively developed but from my experience so far I think they just don't need much work.
2 - On glibc/linux target: it should generate pure and simple ELF binaries (not C/c++ binaries). It has the following implications:
a - the static libstdc++ from gcc probably has to be forked that to "libdl" everything it needs from the glibc/posix libs.
b - everything else from the system has to be libdl-ed too, even the libc symbols.
c - third party libs must be libdl-ized too.
d - ofc, usage of "-static-libgcc" and "-static-libstdc++" build options to mitigate ABI issues (got hit again by that and recently, c++ ABI nightmare).
e - no C/c++ main() function, only the sysv ABI(ELF) entry point (which is basically main anyway).
f - usage of system TLS variable, like errno, must be handled only via the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr() ABI function (I have to admit, I did not dive that much into this issue yet).
g - proton is a money sink hole, massive and horrible software microsoft grade. To make it worse, it is said to include actual real software components from doz. Only consider it if your technical debt on doz OSes is too high (basically, you started to "think" "other platform ports" too late).
If not mitigating those issues above: games using godot must be build on the oldest glibc as possible, that to avoid GNU symbol versioning issues. They should static link as much as the can, even some glibc libs (libm static linking is mandatory since GNU symbol versions here are madness). And conservatively build using the "-static-libgcc" "-static-libstdc++" options.
rant on: Godot should not have been a c++ engine but a simple C/ASM one (should be able to compile with tcc/cproc/scc/pcc/etc), using the preprocessor for namespaces in order to avoid symbol collision, and using compile-time function tables and runtime function tables (for "fallbacks", like wayland->x11).
The really guilty ppl are actually glibc and gcc devs, not the game devs.
rant off.
Godot is a joy to use on its own, but when you also consider how it's licensed and doesn't require some awful launcher, it starts to feel like a breath of fresh air.
Any time a company tries to make me feel like I'm at work, I stop wanting to make games with their product.
Godot is really great, and the GDScript is something you don't really need to "learn". It feels intuitive and easy enough to be productive from day one. The performance, compilation speed, binary build - very quick. If was I writing a "game engine" that probably the system I would've come up with. The GUI feels flawless, responsive, very easy to work with. Online/offline help/documentation
is top notch.
Would I use it if I am serious about gamedev as a job? Probably not. Version 4 is supposed to bring a lot of improvements and this is awesome. I am not sure I would invest into building a product in version 3 (as it will be deprecated if not by its team then by the plugin makers). Version 4 is not ready yet and specifically mentions to have "tons of bugs" once it's out. As a hobby game developer this is an truly great product to work with. I started with a few 2d tutorials and probably after a week felt really productive. Also it feels like 1st class citizen on Linux (tbh Ubuntu also made great progress here).
The only really thing missing for me - in order to use my C++ simulation engine I need to re-compile C++ Godot sources along with my code? A bit too much for me at this stage. But didn't investigate it enough if there is an easier solution (version 4 is supposed to give more options). Using C# is as an option too. But they mention C# in terms of "support" is "secondary" whatever this means - without more experience it is hard to understand the implications.
Unity is too mature and skills are there if you need to hire or outsource. Mobile publishers, for example (from what I've seen) only accept unity games. You can buy great plugins/assets for reasonable amount of money. Obviously with the money they have it is the product you want to base your business on if you develop professionally. If anything Unity should be compared to Unreal engine, not Godot from the perspective of developing professionally.
Anyways it is really great to see an OSS product that is so close to the mature big commercial products that people have these discussions, run benchmarks and seriously consider switching to Godot. The quality of effort and skill I've seen people put into Godot development (and its plugins) is something unreal and too awesome be true. Go Go Godot!!!
Hopefully the async/await story gets fleshed out. Unity just made the default scheduler run on the main thread. That's pretty much all it takes but it would be nice if it was built in.
And formerly Paradox, if I'm not mistaken. It's one of the worst marketed game engines I have seen. Two rebrandings and practically zero social media presence. People are still starting more new projects with XNA than with Stride.
I would be promising asset compatibility with Unity and shouting about that everywhere if I were Stride.
Maybe it's because writing C# in Unity is really just using the Unity SDK and not writing actual C# code, but I wouldn't want to hop over to Godot just because it supports C#, as learning it was born out of necessity and was never an enjoyable experience. I'd be much more interested in their GodotScript or plugins for other languages I'm familiar in.
What if I want to create my own Roblox, how would I do that here? Is there a 3d engine/game engine where I can tweak the editor and distribute to my end users?
The point is so that I can lean on the community to create the content and I would just focus on maintaining game servers, and adding moderators.
The new MultiplayerSynchronizer and MultiplayerSpawner nodes in Godot 4 (still in alpha, beta soon) make life so much easier. I'm going to be submitting a demo for using them hopefully next week - but generally you just check some boxes for properties to be synced at spawn or continuously and set the network authority for each of them (aka Player 2 is master of his object, but Player 1 is master of the rest of the world) and it does the rest.
> Using async and await with C#’s Task can be a bit of a headache with Godot, especially if you don’t realize that that most ways of executing an async Task in C# starts a new thread (or recycles one from the task thread pool).
I use it on macOS and Windows, and it is lovely! I even have Steamworks.NET integrations working on both platforms with it. It can be a bit tricky to setup the `.csproj` correctly to resolve native dependencies, but not anything impossible.
> Godot doesn’t fight you when you’re building scenes. Making a scene feels a lot like creating a class using composition, and scenes can even inherit from other scenes (using another scene as the the root node of a scene allows you to inherit from it and override its properties in the editor and in code), allowing you to express patterns you’re intimately familiar with from object-oriented programming.
I personally find the approach of nodes everywhere a bit odd.
In my mind, you'd typically use nodes for objects that are supposed to represent some sort of an object or concept within the scene, whereas the scripts would be the ones that actually give said object any number of behaviors, such as a certain group of functionality per script.
It kind of feels like it would be nicer to be able to attach a number of scripts to the object that I actually want to control, instead of having Nodes that I don't really see much of a use for, apart from them being script containers.
Of course, maybe that's just because I'm used to the GameObject pattern that Unity uses, an entity-component system (of sorts), though that implementation has gotten a bunch of critique as well, with DOTS apparently being a better ECS approach, though also unfinished in certain aspects.
Just felt like sharing my thoughts on that particular aspect, which some might find curious and which might take a bit of getting used to (though personally not having a separate "prefab" concept and instead having more or less everything be a node is also pretty freeing, I have to say).
With a bit of love, using C# could also be pretty amazing, since GDScript does have certain limitations (performance comes to mind, for when you need it to be decent for number crunching but don't want to/can't use C++ due to knowledge or other restrictions, C# has your back there) and curious design choices (the integration with the engine is super nice and the Python like syntax is great, but having to define singletons in the editor IIRC is a bit silly https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/s...).
I'd love an alternative for 2D games to Unity but I haven't found one that has the breadth of features as well as demonstrated high quality games. It doesn't help that Godot fans constantly push their engine-of-choice every chance they get. We get it, you're excited... Show, don't tell. Build super high quality stuff and prove it's time to stop waiting.
Zhyl|3 years ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32003065
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051
eropple|3 years ago
bluefirebrand|3 years ago
spywaregorilla|3 years ago
Thaxll|3 years ago
https://godotengine.org/showcase
Looking at any of thoses games looks bad tbh it's like weekend project / low indie games.
overgard|3 years ago
- Asset store. I totally get it, handling payments, curating, etc. are a huge task... but man, I'm a coder, and I don't have the funds to pay an artist or a musician full time. Being able to just go buy a pack of trees for $20 or something is a huge timer saver.
- Animation re-targeting. It seems like there's a 3rd party plugin for this but it also seems like it hasn't been updated in a year. In unity I can buy a big pack of animations for pretty cheap and reuse it on almost all my humanoid characters. That's huge. I think this can be done in Blender or Maya, but it's so seamless in the engine compared to using a 3rd party tool.
giancarlostoro|3 years ago
Heh I mentioned this in another Godot thread a few days ago. It sounds like a potential YC funded startup for anyone inclined and something that could be with the knowledge and collaboration of the core maintainers of Godot as a simple means to fund Godot.
chamakits|3 years ago
I would encourage you to try some of these! You'd be surprised how far you can get by using these, with and without modification.
These are my favorite resources, in order of preference.
- <https://www.kenney.nl/> is by far the best one and most expansive one. Everything he creates is CC0. A lot of great free assets available on his site. He also has a "Kenney Game Assets All-in-1" which can be bought on itch.io for $19.95. It has all assets he's ever made, neatly organized, and ready to use. All CC0. This also includes some music. The music and sound assets are much more limited than the 2D and 3D assets, but it's there, and it's solid.
- <https://kaylousberg.com/game-assets> has some fantastic assets also available for free, and has more available for a pretty affordable Patreon tier. Also has a CC0 license for the free assets. Mostly a specific style, which is great for consistency, but a bit more limited than the wide variety of Kenney; but I don't doubt that with time they'll build an equally strong library of assets.
- <https://quaternius.com/> has many free great assets. Also CC0. Has a high variety of styles and settings. Also has a very affordable Patreon to get easy access to everything they produce.
- <https://github.com/Miziziziz/Retro3DGraphicsCollection> is a general place linking to more assets that should be usable.
Separately from this, itch.io has a section for game assets that has a pretty wide variety.
wly_cdgr|3 years ago
dleslie|3 years ago
Godot is an interesting engine and editor, but that's not enough to make me switch. Show me the ecosystem of services and tools that surround it, and how _utterly trivial_ they are to access, and I might consider switching.
to-too-two|3 years ago
Yeah, that'd be cool. However, there are tools like Mixamo by Adobe that provide lots of pre-made animations.
As for an asset store for paid assets, there are already a few 3rd party sites for this.
esperent|3 years ago
Does it need to be a tool specific to Godot? There are other tools that can do this, for example, have you tried mixamo.com?
wkirby|3 years ago
That said, I have a _few_ items that I think are absolute showstoppers for solo-dev side projects.
1. The asset pipeline is simply not as clean as Unity's. The ability to drop a .blend file in the project in Unity is so underrated. In Godot FBX imports are unreliable, texture imports misbehave frequently, and rigging goes wrong even in the recommended file formats. There's a lot less clarity around the path to getting real assets in game, which can be a major pain point for solo devs.
2. Along the same lines, there is no equivalent of Unity's mecanim. With Unity, if you can model and rig a character in Blender, you can pull free mocap or other animations from the asset store and get to work. In Godot you're still best off authoring your own animations for each character. This drastically increases the amount of time spent making assets.
3. Godot is in a weird spot version wise for anyone who wants to use C#; the beta version of 4.0 is rapidly approaching, and guarantees to break any project you start in 3.x --- but 4.0 still doesn't come built with C# support. Hopefully this gets resolved soon.
disintegore|3 years ago
I was under the impression that Godot had at least two full-time devs working on it. Between their patreon revenue and the grants they've received they can definitely afford a small team on payroll. It's still important to stress the comparison in scope between Unity and Godot, but the latter is definitely more than a hobby project at this point.
jolexxa|3 years ago
Either way, it seems a lot of people have contributed without sponsorship, but the main devs are (hopefully) compensated.
brundolf|3 years ago
Mattish|3 years ago
Myself and plenty of others at small or above size studios would have to make a huge leap into Godot and hope you don't run into any scaling issues. Not just from a project point of view, but integration on the artistic side.
LTS versions of Unity despite the known "un-fun" of it, are stable in a sense. Godot is moving fast, that isn't always a good thing for stability.
I'd love to jump on the new shiny and fun engine! But having to make the definitive choice for a company to make their next project in? Unfortunately just isn't there yet. "It's fun as a dev" just isn't a compelling argument for literally everyone else who isn't the engineer, compared to the number of all size studio pumping out Unity projects(Some even being successful!).
singhrac|3 years ago
withinboredom|3 years ago
rubychill|3 years ago
I switched from Unity to Godot in 2016 when 2.0 came out and I haven't looked back since. I find Godot fits so nicely with how I like to make things compared to Unity or Unreal. It has that comfy feeling like Aesprite, sxfr, and bosca ceoil where the tool itself has an artistic expression.
I agree with most downsides that people have in regards to Godot, lacking asset store, lacking in the amount of tutorials compared to other engine, lacking in completed titles at scale, etc.
However for my purposes I've never found these to be a deal breaker, and if anything I prefer being part of the smaller community that Godot has - it feels more grassroots and aligned with my personal values.
999900000999|3 years ago
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope, I wasted 2 hours of my life trying to get these signals to work in GD script.
I'm going to try some other open source engines, but trying to jerry-rig an extra language on top of a relatively immature engine isn't a very good idea.
Now I imagine if Microsoft decided to come out of an engine, they could rationalize supporting six or seven languages. But if you're already a small project, what ends up happening is the other language support just isn't as good
nchi3|3 years ago
cain|3 years ago
bj-rn|3 years ago
It's MIT and fully written in C#.
debacle|3 years ago
That's my biggest complaint with Unity at this point. So much is built around the GameObject implementation that when you start using ECS you can feel the friction - you're writing a lot more code, you're doing things in a way that feel like swimming upstream, and there's less support + documentation.
How does Godot compare? Are highly threaded features out of the box? I would use Unreal but the C# Unreal interfaces I've seen are very immature.
TillE|3 years ago
If you're doing graphically simple games with a complex simulation under the hood (everyone loves RimWorld as an example), then you don't really benefit from an ECS that's tightly integrated with the engine. You just do all that stuff however you want, and use the engine as an I/O layer.
idle_zealot|3 years ago
tacotacotaco|3 years ago
[1] https://bevyengine.org/
Mikeb85|3 years ago
Ish. But Godot very much embraces OO. Everything is a node extending another node with messages passed between. But IMO it's OO done right.
overgard|3 years ago
citizenkeen|3 years ago
I love Godot and I use .NET in my day job, but I feel like C# in Godot has always been a second class citizen.
_gabe_|3 years ago
> .NET (Core) -- A cross-platform and open source implementation of .NET, rethought for the cloud age while remaining significantly compatible with .NET Framework. Used for Linux, macOS, and Windows apps.[0]
[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/introduction
marcodiego|3 years ago
> At first glance, Unity is so laughably ahead of Godot in sheer number of features supported that it seems comical to compare the two.
> In practice, Unity requires 3rd party tools for tweens, timers, and networking, all of which Godot includes out-of-the-box. Still, I’d argue that it doesn’t actually matter for the vast majority of us indie game developers.
202206241203|3 years ago
It's a framework not an engine though - more programming from scratch rather than scripting pre-existing things in a visual editor.
pipeline_peak|3 years ago
Is this actually true? I always figured Unity's selling point was being lighter and easier to use than unreal.
Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.
johnfn|3 years ago
> Godot looks like Unity from 2008, it's easy to boast efficiency when you have a limited product.
Unity does have more features - like more obscure 3D features - but that has nothing to do with how Unity deems it necessary to rescan the project tree all the time. Also, when I used Unity, I never used these extra features, so even if this were true, how come all users have to pay the price for features that only a few of us will use?
Honestly, core Godot is very full-featured, and in my experience the central abstractions are much better thought out than those in Unity. I feel a lot of the FUD around "Unity has more features than Godot" comes from people that like seeing a long list of features, not from people who actually need those features.
sfteus|3 years ago
The only two concrete things I can point to are better documentation (IMO), and the first-class signal/observer support in Godot. I'm not sure if that exists in Unity or not, but it's a really intuitive way to handle entity interaction, and I think that makes it way more easy for beginners to get started.
Uehreka|3 years ago
Entinel|3 years ago
psyc|3 years ago
It's unfortunate that Epic ever let Unity persuade people that it's better suited to anything or anyone at all.
okwubodu|3 years ago
I’m not sure what it is but it’s gotten significantly worse over the past few years and I’ve stopped recommending it to new game devs.
overgard|3 years ago
The editor itself always seems very buggy. If you have the "Console" open (which you will if you're coding), it's pretty much guaranteed you're going to see a lot of random errors that have nothing to do with even your code. A lot of them don't even make sense or could be ignored. Like you'll get weird asset import errors if you upgrade versions, but a lot of times they're just red herrings and not important. There's also a lot of QOL stuff that's very frustrating, like arrays being annoying to edit (I'm not sure if they've fixed this yet or not). It's also easy to accidentally brick your editor on your own, with debugger shenanigans or loops that don't end.
Also, if you're trying to build a an editor extension, omg was that a nightmare. Just getting things like Undo/Redo and object serialization working correctly are difficult and in some cases impossible. And frankly, you need extensions for a lot of things to actually be useful, like until recently the builtin terrain editor was basically useless, and you have things like Odin because the builtin inspector is a nightmare.
There's a lot to like about Unity, but there's also a huge amount of pain points with it.
disintegore|3 years ago
Then ten or twenty years pass and it becomes the thing to replace.
KronisLV|3 years ago
I'd say that yes, at least in the last 5 or so years.
I decided to make a scene which would contain a single copy of every single model that I'd like to use in a project of mine, for checking the textures, how lighting works, the scale of everything etc.
By the time I got to around 200 different objects (no high poly ones, by the way), it took like a minute to just open that scene.
luxuryballs|3 years ago
binarynate|3 years ago
caconym_|3 years ago
wilg|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
wilg|3 years ago
I hope one of these projects takes off: https://github.com/migueldeicaza/GodotSwift https://github.com/kelvin13/godot-swift
Excited to try Godot in a couple of years when it's more mature. Hopefully they can be the Blender of game engines – where it started rough and now is better than Maya or other alternatives.
throwaway675309|3 years ago
C# is a robust language with a lot of features like lambdas pattern matching etc. I also find that most of the people who know Swift are Apple developers, so I feel like there isn't a broad enough appeal especially for game devs who are going to be more Windows or Linux centric.
ianlevesque|3 years ago
weberer|3 years ago
kitsunesoba|3 years ago
mdbauman|3 years ago
In particular, a sibling comment mentions Kotlin. The docs[2] link to a project that adds Kotlin bindings https://github.com/utopia-rise/godot-kotlin-jvm
[1]https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_...
[2]https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g...
arcturus17|3 years ago
What don’t you like about it?
metaltyphoon|3 years ago
BlargMcLarg|3 years ago
Really, it's not the developers you have to worry about. It's everyone else. Godot is made with developers in mind, but there's much more to do than wiring signals and writing code. If you can't map things one to one from a different program or close to that through a plugin, you're either giving yourself more work, or forcing not just developers, but artists to relearn processes too.
The small stuff will get fixed over time.
sfteus|3 years ago
I've only used Godot in a hobby context, but the full on C# support compared to other engines is pretty amazing. Just as a proof of concept I imported an open source C# library I've worked on that's designed to play old DOS music formats, created a small wrapper node with control functions, and I was able to control it as expected from within GDScript nodes right out of the box. Only issue I would have seen down the road would be cross-platform compatibility since the library itself was Windows only.
Caveat: I can't say I've ever got far enough in Unity to say if the C# support is of a similar scope. Godot just "clicks" better for me, so I've gotten way farther with it than anything I've done in Unity.
arminiusreturns|3 years ago
Context: My game project has been going since 2013, on godot since 2018.
hitpointdrew|3 years ago
mindwok|3 years ago
1. C# in Godot is faster than GDScript.
2. The type safety features of C# are a bit more mature (and non-optional) for C#
joemi|3 years ago
dcow|3 years ago
nitrixion|3 years ago
If this was simply a matter of "Unity wants to do ads better" and they purchased an adtech company, I doubt there would be much discussion about it. That is not what happened. ironSource is not just an adtech company but a company that has built and distributed software that has been classified as malware by Sophos and Microsoft Essentials[1].
While this may be an overdramatic take, once ironSource is fully integrated with Unity and we update to the latest LTS version that includes ironSource software, I expect that we will want to virus scan our own executables built through Unity. I do not trust ironSource nor do I trust any software that integrates with it.
Now, putting the malware concern aside, I also see this as a step in the wrong direction for Unity. There are MANY uses for Unity that are not games, that will never have ads, and that will never utilize anything from this acquisition. The concern here is that recent updates of Unity have made some of these features such that you cannot disable them.
To me, this is yet another poor decision by the Unity team. As an aside, I recently started looking into their freshly released new Analytics platform and it is an absolute mess of a release. There are massive oversights in the implementation and bugs that prevent workarounds to those oversights.
Unity is not looking like software worth betting your company's future on. At best, it is looking more like prototyping software before using a better engine.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronSource#InstallCore
dleslie|3 years ago
But you won't hear many "indie" developers say as much, because making money is uncool.
That said, IronSource is sketchy as hell. I'm more concerned about _who_ they merged with then that it was an ad company.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
throwawaycuriou|3 years ago
daveoc64|3 years ago
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
I'm not a professional game dev, but I can't see why you'd want to shut off that avenue.
remram|3 years ago
curioussavage|3 years ago
sylware|3 years ago
2 - On glibc/linux target: it should generate pure and simple ELF binaries (not C/c++ binaries). It has the following implications:
a - the static libstdc++ from gcc probably has to be forked that to "libdl" everything it needs from the glibc/posix libs.
b - everything else from the system has to be libdl-ed too, even the libc symbols.
c - third party libs must be libdl-ized too.
d - ofc, usage of "-static-libgcc" and "-static-libstdc++" build options to mitigate ABI issues (got hit again by that and recently, c++ ABI nightmare).
e - no C/c++ main() function, only the sysv ABI(ELF) entry point (which is basically main anyway).
f - usage of system TLS variable, like errno, must be handled only via the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr() ABI function (I have to admit, I did not dive that much into this issue yet).
g - proton is a money sink hole, massive and horrible software microsoft grade. To make it worse, it is said to include actual real software components from doz. Only consider it if your technical debt on doz OSes is too high (basically, you started to "think" "other platform ports" too late).
If not mitigating those issues above: games using godot must be build on the oldest glibc as possible, that to avoid GNU symbol versioning issues. They should static link as much as the can, even some glibc libs (libm static linking is mandatory since GNU symbol versions here are madness). And conservatively build using the "-static-libgcc" "-static-libstdc++" options.
rant on: Godot should not have been a c++ engine but a simple C/ASM one (should be able to compile with tcc/cproc/scc/pcc/etc), using the preprocessor for namespaces in order to avoid symbol collision, and using compile-time function tables and runtime function tables (for "fallbacks", like wayland->x11).
The really guilty ppl are actually glibc and gcc devs, not the game devs. rant off.
plaguepilled|3 years ago
Any time a company tries to make me feel like I'm at work, I stop wanting to make games with their product.
rfrerebe|3 years ago
democracy|3 years ago
Would I use it if I am serious about gamedev as a job? Probably not. Version 4 is supposed to bring a lot of improvements and this is awesome. I am not sure I would invest into building a product in version 3 (as it will be deprecated if not by its team then by the plugin makers). Version 4 is not ready yet and specifically mentions to have "tons of bugs" once it's out. As a hobby game developer this is an truly great product to work with. I started with a few 2d tutorials and probably after a week felt really productive. Also it feels like 1st class citizen on Linux (tbh Ubuntu also made great progress here).
The only really thing missing for me - in order to use my C++ simulation engine I need to re-compile C++ Godot sources along with my code? A bit too much for me at this stage. But didn't investigate it enough if there is an easier solution (version 4 is supposed to give more options). Using C# is as an option too. But they mention C# in terms of "support" is "secondary" whatever this means - without more experience it is hard to understand the implications.
Unity is too mature and skills are there if you need to hire or outsource. Mobile publishers, for example (from what I've seen) only accept unity games. You can buy great plugins/assets for reasonable amount of money. Obviously with the money they have it is the product you want to base your business on if you develop professionally. If anything Unity should be compared to Unreal engine, not Godot from the perspective of developing professionally.
Anyways it is really great to see an OSS product that is so close to the mature big commercial products that people have these discussions, run benchmarks and seriously consider switching to Godot. The quality of effort and skill I've seen people put into Godot development (and its plugins) is something unreal and too awesome be true. Go Go Godot!!!
jayd16|3 years ago
everyone|3 years ago
I have been a Unity dev for years and my main reason for using it is that I can build to most platforms with relative ease from the one engine.
T-A|3 years ago
https://www.stride3d.net/
orthoxerox|3 years ago
I would be promising asset compatibility with Unity and shouting about that everywhere if I were Stride.
prophesi|3 years ago
languageserver|3 years ago
adamrezich|3 years ago
jolexxa|3 years ago
WorldMaker|3 years ago
yomkippur|3 years ago
The point is so that I can lean on the community to create the content and I would just focus on maintaining game servers, and adding moderators.
TaupeRanger|3 years ago
cridenour|3 years ago
viktorcode|3 years ago
Unity makes it much easier though.
pleb_nz|3 years ago
jolexxa|3 years ago
KronisLV|3 years ago
I personally find the approach of nodes everywhere a bit odd.
In my mind, you'd typically use nodes for objects that are supposed to represent some sort of an object or concept within the scene, whereas the scripts would be the ones that actually give said object any number of behaviors, such as a certain group of functionality per script.
So you might have something like the following:
Unity kind of vaguely got that "right" (e.g. in a way that's subjectively intuitive to me) with its component system.Whereas in Godot you can only have one script per node, which would mean that in practice I'd have something like:
It kind of feels like it would be nicer to be able to attach a number of scripts to the object that I actually want to control, instead of having Nodes that I don't really see much of a use for, apart from them being script containers.Of course, maybe that's just because I'm used to the GameObject pattern that Unity uses, an entity-component system (of sorts), though that implementation has gotten a bunch of critique as well, with DOTS apparently being a better ECS approach, though also unfinished in certain aspects.
Just felt like sharing my thoughts on that particular aspect, which some might find curious and which might take a bit of getting used to (though personally not having a separate "prefab" concept and instead having more or less everything be a node is also pretty freeing, I have to say).
With a bit of love, using C# could also be pretty amazing, since GDScript does have certain limitations (performance comes to mind, for when you need it to be decent for number crunching but don't want to/can't use C++ due to knowledge or other restrictions, C# has your back there) and curious design choices (the integration with the engine is super nice and the Python like syntax is great, but having to define singletons in the editor IIRC is a bit silly https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/s...).
seneca|3 years ago
strangeattractr|3 years ago
mbrodersen|3 years ago
JetAlone|3 years ago
didibus|3 years ago
I'm not a game dev, but its the engine King uses that they completely open sourced, and I think it can be a good alternative.
mdaniel|3 years ago
aikah|3 years ago
> Devs not baking monetisation into the creative process are “fucking idiots”, says Unity’s John Riccitiello
https://mobilegamer.biz/devs-not-baking-monetisation-into-th...
If he talks in public like that, imagine how this guy talks to his employees behind closed doors...
hertzrat|3 years ago
Nobody tries to hide anymore that a lot of game companies just create skinner boxes
Kiro|3 years ago
potemkin_buster|3 years ago
yomkippur|3 years ago
BoorishBears|3 years ago
"mobilegamer.biz" is betting on you not reading before getting outraged, and it looks like that paid off.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
edmcnulty101|3 years ago
[deleted]
jsiaajdsdaa|3 years ago
Shadonototra|3 years ago
People literally learnt nothing at all
Want to stay away from unity?
You should also stay away from C# and Microsoft
https://exceptionnotfound.net/the-catch-block-80-the-dotnet-...
aschearer|3 years ago