Godot at GDC 2018

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-doing-well-gdc-2018

by makepanic • 8 years ago

463 102 8 years ago

tekromancr• 8 years ago

Awesome! I have played with godot before, and while it has some sharp edges I am thrilled to see an opensource engine coming together so well. Great job to all involved!

bringtheaction2• 8 years ago

Been following Godot for a good while but never tried it myself. I support them on Patreon anyway though, just because I think it's important that we have a truly open source game engine like Godot :) Did you try Godot 3.0 yet?

cowmix• 8 years ago

My kid who's in high school watched a few Godot tutorials on Youtube and then created a nice/simple game in about 24 hours.

We walked me through the whole process and it is amazing the whole system is free.

bringtheaction2• 8 years ago

it is amazing the whole system is free

Speaking of which, they have a Patreon. Anyone interested in the prospect of contributing financially to the development of Godot, check out https://www.patreon.com/godotengine

giancarlostoro3• 8 years ago

I gotta say Godot is one of those open source projects I want to see more commercial adoption of. Not only is it well done, it is miles ahead of the commercial offerings and everything from the tooling to the engine is MIT licensed. You can do plugins not only for the engine, but the tooling itself! This means that you're not limited only by what is already available through the standard IDE they built (which is really already great) but by your imagination entirely. You can code plugins in any native language you so desire as well thanks to GDNative (this includes Rust, D, and more).

Also don't forget, they've got the latest of Mono available to you, so modern C# features at your fingertips, no more C# 3.5 like a certain industry slowpoke...

gameswithgo2• 8 years ago

Unity can use .NET 4.6 now. It wasn't because they were slowpokes, xamarin would not license it to them until they were acquired by Microsoft.

carussell• 8 years ago

- Mono's license prior to the Microsoft/Xamarin acquisition was LGPL, which is open ended and doesn't allow e.g. discriminating against Unity; Unity would not accept it under those terms

- Xamarin did offer a commercial license to Unity; Unity would not accept it

- MS began to release their own .NET implementation under the kinds of license terms that Unity wanted years ago, but Unity didn't budge

- In the meantime, MS then relicensed Mono itself—the .NET implementation that Unity actually wanted—under the kinds of terms that Unity wanted, but still Unity didn't show signs of moving until very recently

The whole it's Mono's fault that Unity sucks was essentially a successful PR attempt for Unity to disclaim responsibility for their shortcomings, with the (maybe not unintentional) side effect of directing public ire towards Mono for not doing enough free work (to benefit what was already one of the industry's most successful companies!)

psyc7• 8 years ago

As a fulltime Unity dev, this doesn't matter much to me, because it doesn't address the major pain point for larger Unity games. This .NET upgrade does not include a modern garbage collector, and the garbage collector update has been "maybe next year, but definitely not now, because it's hard" for as long as I've been using Unity.

Workarounds exist. That's great. I don't care. Workarounds don't address the default experience of writing idiomatic C#.

I've considered switching to Unreal, but that has GC built into it a little too much. I know nothing about its characteristics, but it makes me wary. This thread makes me want to investigate Godot. Can anyone provide a one-sentence summary of the GC situation there?

Jugglerofworlds2• 8 years ago

I just tried to upgrade my project to 4.6 in Unity a few hours ago (using the 2018.1 beta). I ended up having to switch back because of build errors. For anyone who is interested in upgrading to 4.6: I suggest waiting until later in the 2018 release cycle so that all the kinks can be worked out.

doomlaser5• 8 years ago

You still run with the same naive and expensive boehm garbage collection sweeper that Unity has always had (since 2005?). The machinations some Unity developers go through to avoid allocating memory and inadvertently triggering a sweep are worse than the old days of just managing your own memory manually in C and C++.

Why they have never hired a team to simply create a reference counting fork of their object system is beyond me. Their GC is the reason Unity games have a reputation for running with inconsistent choppy frame rates. You'd think fixing that would be top priority.

But they have never committed publicly to a timeline to fix it, and it is a glaring weakpoint in their runtime environment. Possibly worse than any other, besides the insane and broken way they designed their "prefab" concept. Those 2 flaws have led me to call Unity the "Javascript of Game Engines" in the past. It's not quite that bad, but it's close.

gt_• 8 years ago

Unity is a bottomfeeding company in so many ways. If they were more upfront about prioritizing phone-apps and low-fi projects, it would be acceptable. But instead, their business plan appears to be:

1. Rope in beginners with network effect, asset store, popular fear of C++.

2. Promote as many new features as possible, with only the most minimal discretion of whether the features actually work or help, anybody because once their demographic notices the ploy, they are too invested to leave. Ideally, they will build a few products for the asset store to make up for the dismal investment.

3. Throw enough dirt and some of it will stick. Mass promotion to beginners gives them enough sign-ups to keep going. Interesting how the pricing model means beginners can’t view the unpredictable performance issues until they start paying.

They consistently fail to prioritize the problems with memory management, lightmapping, and material standards that plague serious Unity devs. I have switched to using Unreal and it’s like night and day. I am super interested in Godot.

doomlaser5• 8 years ago

Godot is advancing at a fast clip. Godot 3 is a nice milestone. They're on bullet now for physics, which is nice (just like all the GTA games). Disney BSDF, their pbr stuff, and global illumination lighting look really good. https://godotengine.org/storage/app/media/devlog/rendering/f...

Here's some video of their third person platformer demo project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRwCxMYSIk8

And their post about 3.0: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-0-released

If nothing else, I hope it puts some pressure on Unity to solve and ship fixes for some of their longstanding weaknesses — (their bizarre and fundamentally handicapped prefab system, their slow runtime boehm garbage collector which hasn't been updated in a decade, the need to expensively recompile your entire project with every small change to a .cs file, etc) as opposed to just making grand promises at keynotes. I do like Unity's recent integrations of ProBuilder and TextMeshPro. I don't mean to bash it, but Godot deserves to succeed alongside it given its admirable development and licensing model.

jordigh• 8 years ago

You weren't kidding about D. It looks like just this week someone released some D bindings for Godot. Exciting! I really like D, and I am curious to try gamedev in D.

https://code.dlang.org/packages/godot-d

giancarlostoro3• 8 years ago

I really wasn't! Glad you found it, I think the Github repository is even older if it's the project I saw a while back. All of that is possible because of GDNative, which ties together native code back to Godot itself so you don't have to recompile the whole engine just to bind native code to it.

Adding a link to their GitHub since to me is looks like the dub website is slow / down?

Link to D bindings for Godot:

https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-d

Edit: Looks like they got Rust and C++ bindings in their umbrella too:

https://github.com/GodotNativeTools

naikrovek• 8 years ago

miles ahead of the commercial offerings

In some ways, maybe. In all ways, or even "most", no. Definitely not.

For a free engine it is impressive, no doubt, but it is not miles ahead of commercial offerings.

giancarlostoro3• 8 years ago

In some ways yes, and it will only get better over time as more developers become aware of Godot. It may even be that most people wont realize the richer plugin ecosystem that will grow around Godot (which is surely growing!) and that will be it's biggest strength much like how Atom and VS Code spread so quickly. Godot doesn't force you into their ecosystem, they welcome you to use GDScript but it's not your only path forward thanks to GDNative.

muwaisaac• 8 years ago

Loving Godot so far. I'd tried many an engine to get into gaming. With Godot, i felt the least resistance.

plexicle• 8 years ago

Looks great! I've heard of Godot quite a bit and have been meaning to check it out.

Boy do I feel like a dummy though... I thought it was "Go"dot and it was built with and/or uses Go(lang). Can't say I wasn't just a tiny bit disappointed!

In any case, I just checked out some of the videos and the IDE in particular looks pretty amazing. Will check it out for sure.

applecrazy4• 8 years ago

You can actually use Golang with Godot to code gameplay using some open source bindings[1] for GDNative.

[1] https://github.com/ShadowApex/godot-go

Shorel• 8 years ago

Not being tied to "Go"lang is the reason I am interested in it.

curioussavage• 8 years ago

I love Godot right now. I have made a ton of progress on my game in the last two months using it. Highly recommend it to anyone wanting to pick up game dev as a hobby.

yanisvieilly• 8 years ago

I started using Godot recently. Do you have any good tutorials to recommend?

nrjames• 8 years ago

I'm keen to try Godot.

The only thing I'd like to see soon or at least on the roadmap is Switch support. Other open source toolkits, like Monogame, have included it. I believe Love2D also supports it now, or at least has a partner that will build projects for it.

rushsteve1• 8 years ago

According to the Godot docs[1] this doesn't seem to be a priority for them, though I would also love to see Switch support. Though in those same docs they point out a third-party which provides console ports. Not an ideal solution by any means, but it is still an option.

[1] http://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consol...

keyle2• 8 years ago

Mate I wouldn't really worry about Switch support. Even if you could port your game to Switch, Nintendo has a tight ironclad gate on the "indie" titles that make it in the store.

And if you're thinking homebrew, the only thing you could run your game on would be a Switch devkit.

Impossible• 8 years ago

It's not unrealistic to worry about Switch support. You seem to be coming from the perspective of a hobbyist game developer, which is fine, but anyone running a serious game development project should at least consider the cost of potential console ports, even if it seems inaccesible to a hobbyist.

kentm• 8 years ago

Does anyone have an opinion on Godot Vs Unreal Engine?

ordinaryradical• 8 years ago

Unreal is ahead on some of their 3D capabilities—Godot only targets OpenGL ES 3, at the moment. However, this affords Godot a huge number of target platforms on the same codebase and, in a huge turn, now that MoltenVK is being open sourced by Valve, Godot is moving its render API to Vulkan.

If you want to play with all the bells and whistles now, Unreal currently let’s you use a more advanced graphical pipeline; if you want to multi-platform your game or you won’t be releasing a shader-heavy 3D game in the next year, I would at least try Godot.

pzone• 8 years ago

Unreal Engine is a paid engine with highly developed, opinionated engineering in many subsystems. (visual blueprint scripting, unified material render engine, actor model) Its featureset is advanced enough to support AAA games.

Godot is a free engine offering a C# scripting environment.

applecrazy4• 8 years ago

Actually, Godot offers visual scripting, C# scripting, Python-like scripting, and C++ scripting by default.

More options are available through their GDNative bindings (D, Nim, Golang, etc.)

applecrazy4• 8 years ago

Unreal is great for graphical fidelity. It also has tons of stuff built in because of Epic's own use of the engine. Things like multiplayer support, replay recording, and mobile support are there right out of the box. Plus the engine has been widely adopted (it was used to make PUBG and Fortnite), so you have an active community of amateur and professional game devs who can help you.

While Godot has been adopted by some studios, most stick to their own engines or use Unreal/Unity due to the lack of some of these features (or just a lack of adopters in general, which becomes a chicken-and-egg problem).

However, I'd love for Godot to become as full-featured as Unreal. These are exciting times that we live in.

Edit: Actually Godot also has multiplayer support out of the box in 3.0! It’s getting close in terms of features.

zanny2• 8 years ago

I don't think graphical fidelity is a good argument for any engine today. People are making movies with Unity[1] and Godot has demonstrated[2] all the bells and whistles you could want at least if you intend to target consumer PCs that exist today.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XptlVErsL-o

At least for anyone developing a video game right now, unless you know of specific rendering techniques you need that Unreal has that the others don't, there is nothing you can really come up with that one can do the others cannot.

That being said, I'd imagine in a benchmark of GDNative vs Unity vs Unreal Unreal would probably win, Epic has way more than enough cashflow to throw tons of engineers on optimization that Godot just doesn't have. It wouldn't be an orders of magnitude difference, though - we are talking optimization of already tight render loops, and Godot benefits highly from having a tiny renderer.

rootlocus• 8 years ago

These are exciting times that we live in.

The OGRE 3D engine has been around for almost two decades [1]

Unfortunately, all the tooling is built by the community (with varying degrees of quality), which means, for example, no integrated scene editor.

1. http://wiki.ogre3d.org/Brief+history+of+OGRE

skybrian2• 8 years ago

re: "The Gambling Industry is Largely Moving to Godot."

I don't know, seems like the author should have at least mixed feelings about this? It can't be prevented with an MIT license, but it doesn't seem like great news?

rlonstein• 8 years ago

What is your objection[1]? If companies in that industry are contributing directly to funding development or hiring developers it's positive for the engine and for the rest of the community who get it on the same license terms. Look at how Bet365 (iirc) has kept Riak and some other bits of the Erlang ecosystem going.

[1] Conceding that some minority of people find gambling addictive and they are the customers the game makers tailor their product for.

skybrian2• 8 years ago

It's exactly what you conceded in [1].

If I found out that that open source software I'm working on is ending up in slot machines, I wouldn't feel great about it, even if there's not really anything to be done about it. It just seemed like an odd thing to brag about.

floatboth• 8 years ago

I'm surprised gambling needs 3D at all…

related: AMD is making embedded products for gambling now (look at their YouTube channel)

scott_karana• 8 years ago

They have very flashy, AAA-style graphics now. Check out Konami's pivot:

https://www.casino-review.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CR16...

doikor• 8 years ago

One of the reasons is that Godot has a dedicated 2D engine with pixel units etc.

DaggerDagger• 8 years ago

I'm really excited about Godot. I started using it and saw the limits of the 3d stuff that is there right now but I'm excited to start using it when really good 3d animation libraries become available which seem to be lacking at the moment.

stateoff3• 8 years ago

Here is my personal opinion about Godot vs Unity.

Background Unity:

- I've used Unity for small to medium sized commercial industry projects (3D, VR Tours etc.).

- I've used Unity for a 2D Gamejam.

- Various Unity research projects.

Background Godot:

- I've started using Godot v2.1 with little preparation successfully on two Game jams (2D) [1]

- I've contributed smaller additions and bugfixes to Godot in the past months, in order to help the 3.0 release and also to understand more of the internals.

- I am currently working on a bigger 2D game in Godot 3.0.

This is my personal experience and opinion: First of all: For sure Unity is great and I would not hesitate to use it again in future, especially for 3D (without having much experience in Godot 3.0 3D environment).

However it has drawbacks compared to Godot, especially for 2D which is my main focus:

- Terrible 2D support in Unity (for retro/pixel perfect projects). It's not that it is impossible but you need to know and work around many aspects to setup something that works. Same setup in Godot needs literally two clicks. Units in Godot are pixel units. Perfect.

- No Nested prefabs in Unity. Check out their GDC 2018 keynote (end). It is even a joke to them. Well, to me it isn't. Godot does nested instances and it is a great productivity gain.

- (Open/Public) Source code access in Godot. That probably only applies to people with C++ experience but it was great that I was not stuck since I could dive in and find and fix my problems. Often I found other people with the same problem, and sometimes a PR to fix it, so I could build it from their PR before the official merge and could go on doing my work.

- Source code state/community for Godot. Godot has a pretty non-idealistic style of code. It's not heavily abstracted. And while one could argue if it always has best design choices at least it makes it very easy to dive in. My PRs and fixes were gratefully accepted, it is a very open and productive community. Discussions on Github were constructive in my experience.

- Unity has second class Linux (editor) support. To be fair: it seems to gradually improve. Thanks for that btw. But whenever I try I get showstopping weird issues. Every build is a different problem. In contrast: Godot under Linux is flawless. To be honest: Unity Editor does much more under the hood. And again: I personally do not care. I am focused on 2D and I feel I pay a lot extra.

- GUI. I know that there is now a new GUI framework in Unity but I feel like it made things worse. I have a hard time getting the results I want as compared to Godot's GUI system. Not impossible per se, just not as intuitive as I would like it. Godot's GUI frameworks works similar to Qt Designer. Simple layouts and widgets.

- Nodes and scripts (Godot) vs. Objects and Components (Unity). I have found that the nodes available in Godot make it very easy to come up with various setups. There is just a bunch of (useful) functionality build in. Especially their viewport/offscreen rendering on top of canvas mixed with GUI and shaders make things pretty easy. No need to script for various scenarios + the benefit of these nodes being native.

- 2D Physics. Unity uses box2D (like?) physics. Godot has a custom physics engine that works pretty much like old school arcade physics. It is a perfect starting point for platformers etc. without the sacrifice in control. If your game is NOT an angry birds clone then probably a box2D like physics engine is not what you want.

I was quite surprised myself that Godot boosted my productivity so much as compared to former workflows.

Initially one of my first doubts with Godot was GodotScript. And I must say I was wrong. It is a great little language which helps iterating quickly. And if you are not happy with the performance, you can use C++ or C# or anything else with GodotNativeScript (around 2.6x speedups with C++ in my measurement[2]). I for myself kept GodotScript as iteration speed is more important to me than native performance, especially in the initial stage.

The big negative point as already pointed out is that Godot has few proven examples of successful bigger projects. Therefor platforms may be another issue. But having the source code under control helps, plus there is a drive that hopefully spawns more interest and support in future. Godot deserves it.

To conclude. For 2D I have not found a better tool than Godot. Please disagree if you like but give the tool a fair chance.

[1] Small Godot based Game jam projects: https://itch.io/profile/stateoff

[2] Personal benchmark of GDNativeScript: https://twitter.com/StateOffGames/status/944878511801753601

chairmanwow• 8 years ago

Thanks for this really nice comparison!

tvanantwerp• 8 years ago

Thanks for such a detailed comparison--I think I'll give Godot a try!

mdorazio• 8 years ago

This is exactly the comparison I was looking for - thank you for posting it. I tried Godot back in the pre-2.0 days and found it lacking a number of features I needed for 2D development. I'll definitely be picking it up again.

pjmlp2• 8 years ago

What about Cocos2d-x?

stateoff3• 8 years ago

I think Cocos2d-x is a perfectly suited alternative, especially when you target mobile. However I remember that e.g. render targets were experimental, and in general Desktop is not the main platform. That being said if you hook up an input library even for desktop you can achieve remarkable results [1].

I haven't used the editor much so I won't make any claims here, but if you want to use code, C++ or one of the bindings is your favorite why not Cocos2D-x.

I hope my initial comment did not sound to biased, but to clean this up:

Use whatever feels right to you. I felt very productive with Godot for the type of game I am doing and I just wanted to share my experience :)

[1] Cocos2D-x desktop game "Songbringer" http://store.steampowered.com/app/367080/Songbringer/

a_t484• 8 years ago

Unity has second class Linux (editor) support.

Still better than Unreal’s Linux support. :/

geokon• 8 years ago

How's the interplay btw GodotScript and C++? (and the several other scripting options they give you)

I've played a bit with Unreal, so I'm not very qualified to have opinions, but I really like how the system is mostly a C++ stack. The Blueprints are in effect extending underlying C++ classes. The "FFI", if you want to call that, is pretty clean and easy and if you want to write C++ it works very well with the rest of the system. It definitely could be cleaner... not exactly git-clone, cmake, make, make install... there are magic macros, some C# that does godknowswhat and over all it's messier than I would like.

But with all the scripting that Godot supports it seems like it'd be even messier still? You'll have some assets in C++ some in GodotScript and some in C#. Or am I wrong?

stateoff3• 8 years ago

(Please correct me if any of the following is imprecise, as I am not a core dev of Godot)

Languages are roughly stacked like this:

1. Internal scripting

Godot internally (C++ source) makes a distinction between core and modules. So many of the functionality that do not necessarily belong to the core engine are modules.

You are free to write your own extension to and modules to the editor (for example custom Node types). There is also an EditorPlugin API so you do not necessarily have to get your hands wet in the engine API itself if not necessary. Btw. the latter API is also exposed in GDScript.

Anything that implements script_language.h as a module is considered part of the editor (e.g. exposed in-editor script support etc.)

In 3.0 that would be GDScript and C#.

2. GDNative

Additionally 3.0 introduced GDNative which in essence is an API that exposes the internal C++ API that makes up the In-Game scripting as C symbols. This has the benefit that C can be bound to anything. Going this route even the C++ API is bindings created through C :-). More details here [1].

It is a relatively new effort but so far the following languages are supported (not making claims about stability/maturity here):

- C (just the API itself via the shipped headers)

- C++ [2]

- D [2]

- Rust [2]

- Python [3]

- Nim [4]

- Possibly others?

Once you have a library that can be hooked into you load it in the editor for each individual platform you try to target.

That being said: There is no heavy boilerplate-magic going on. I've setup a CMake file to handle C++ plugins without big issues. There is no real hot-loading AFAIK but you do not need to restart the editor since it loads the libraries in play mode.

This is a sample of the GDNative API [5].

Here is a manual setup with C [6]. While the tooling improved meanwhile (e.g. in editor tools to set the libraries) it gives you a good overview how the GDNative API works.

Hope that makes sense.

[1] GDNative Architecture https://godotengine.org/article/look-gdnative-architecture

[2] Main GDNative Language Bindings https://github.com/GodotNativeTools

[3] Python via GDNative https://github.com/touilleMan/godot-python

[4] Nim via GDNative https://github.com/pragmagic/godot-nim

[5] GDNative C++ API Sample https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-cpp#creating-simpl...

[6] C example of GDNative (Godot Docs) http://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/plugins/gdnativ...

animal531• 8 years ago

Good post, it closely matches where I'm at. For any 2d project I'd look at using Godot (or even a custom/SDL solution) over Unity.

Even for 3d Unity is great to get into, but I always feel that for any non cookie-cutter project I want to build that it is always fighting back against me.

ahtu123• 8 years ago

Unity is REALLY bad and unintuitive for 2D games. It's a 3D engine that begrudgingly lets you draw sprites except alpha and overdraw are really expensive. Basically any 2D engine will perform 1000x better out of the box.

ineedasername• 8 years ago

I read most of that press release with no idea if Godot was a real thing or if it was an eloborate riff on Waiting for Godot

It took clicking around their site a bit to realize it's actually a real thing. I think.

georgewsinger2• 8 years ago

SimulaVR (Linux VR Desktop written in Haskell) is currently in the process of integrating Godot into its rendering loop.

In order to do that we've been making Haskell FFI bindings for the Godot API. If anyone's interested check out: https://GitHub.com/SimulaVR/Simula

aetherspawn• 8 years ago

Are the Haskell godot bindings in a usable state? Very interested

georgewsinger2• 8 years ago

They're not in a usable state yet but will most likely be by the end of the month. They are being generated in one shot via Template Haskell, and will be located here: https://github.com/SimulaVR/godot-haskell

Drop by https://gitter.im/SimulaVR/Simula to discuss this at any point. There are some other Godot people involved in this project as well if you have any questions.

tty7• 8 years ago

Any good tutorials to learn this ? I want to make an outrun like game but no experience in this area

amarsahinovic2• 8 years ago

Here are a few YouTube channels with tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNaPQ5uLX5iIEHUCLmfAgKg/pla...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ/pla...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChv-gaPlKNROf6iMDhxIpUA/pla... (Godot 2 videos but good)

You can also find more links here: https://godot-engine.zeef.com/andre.antonio.schmitz

kumarvvr• 8 years ago

Is this a good engine to begin game programming with? I am an experienced web developer with deep interest in interactive stuff.

zanny2• 8 years ago

Yes, absolutely. Probably by far the optimization between being able to do anything you want while being dead simple to do it in. "Easier" engines like rpgmaker or LOVE severely limit what you can accomplish with the game, while more established engines like UE and Unity have a lot more front loaded scaffolding to do.

thomastjeffery• 8 years ago

more established engines like UE and Unity have a lot more front loaded scaffolding to do.

This, in my opinion, is Godot's biggest advantage. UE and Unity are a lot for a new user to contend with.

veli_joza• 8 years ago

Löve has only one limit - it's 2D. Other than that, you can use build anything you want, in simple and cross-platform way. Löve is easy in terms of API size and tooling, but it's more low-level than other engines and therefore aimed at developers that like to build their own tools along the way. It feels very liberating and productive, plus you are not stuck with sub-par editors (unless you make them such).

thrillgore• 8 years ago

I first discovered Godot when working on an ambitious game. While my ambitions have tempered, my stance on Godot hasn't. It's been a great product to turn out 2D games on, and I am looking forward to trying out some 3D projects with the v3 Renderer. It's not going to replace Unity or Unreal for any ambitious AAA-level title, but it can't be overlooked for rapid prototyping or 2D games.

Godot is also the first project I've ever given Patreon funding for.

Godot at GDC 2018

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