Godot Engine Web Editor

https://editor.godotengine.org/releases/latest/

by todsacerdoti • 5 years ago

274 98 5 years ago

editor.godotengine.org

Darmody• 5 years ago

What's the point of this?

While I think it's cool shouldn't they spend their resources on the desktop engine?

nixarn• 5 years ago

Well, I suspect it's done because it's almost "free" and it's good PR for an engine I hope will become a great alternative to Unity. Here's more on the topic https://godotengine.org/article/godot-editor-running-web-bro...

captn3m0• 5 years ago

It's also sponsored by Mozilla, as the link mentions.

I like the idea of a web-based Godot - reduces barrier to entry, and makes for lots of interesting possibilities - collaborative game jams?

madacol• 5 years ago

A more recent post https://godotengine.org/article/godot-web-progress-report-6

nohr• 5 years ago

There is no one who knows the projects time/financial budgets better than the team. I'm sure their free product is plenty well planned to accommodate for side utilities like this. This might even be from a contributor that has less work than the rest of the team.

eoo• 5 years ago

I met aome of the creators back in the day. The RedHat model is working well for them: open source and sell consultancy. It doesn't scale exponentially but as long as their OSS product is good they won't have a shortage of incoming deals.

Qwertious• 5 years ago

While I think it's cool shouldn't they spend their resources on the desktop engine?

Browser-based games are a perfectly legitimate platform, and tend to have fewer clicks than desktop package distributions. Namely, one click.

Hell, there's nothing stopping this from replacing HTML5/flash games.

pjmlp6• 5 years ago

Other than browsers blocking 3D hardware acceleration.

Applejinx• 5 years ago

One of the targets is webassembly, and the engine is written in the Godot engine. I'm not surprised that they could do this: it's a completely natural outcome from how Godot already works. I doubt it took unusual commitment of resources to do.

thinkingemote• 5 years ago

Two main things:

1) Allows godot in schools etc where installing binaries can be problematic.

2) Provides more focus on improving the html5 target.

From what I understand the editor is a "game". Both the desktop editor and web editor are created in the engine, so improving the engine will improve the web editor too. The web editor is the html5 export of the editor "game"

johnyzee• 5 years ago

Your question is unpopular because everyone here likes the web and want to see it thrive as a platform. So do I, but still, I agree with you. Unfortunately, the web is not a viable platform for games. It had its moment for casual games some years ago, but mobile devices have taken that over. Thats why all the web game portals (the bargain bin bottom of the games space) are languishing, even Facebook Games, with its captive audience, is slowly dwindling away.

To put the actual game editor on the web makes even less sense. It's a cool technical feat, and the author may have thought of it as 'free', as some commenters have alluded to, given that there is already a web export, but anyone with a bit of experience knows that nothing is free, and certainly not a project like this. At the very least it's a months long effort (the author himself stated as much in the blog post), even before factoring in continued maintenance.

I love it as a technical feat, but I'll agree it doesn't make sense from a 'business' perspective (for lack of a better term, given it's an open source project).

onion2k3• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, the web is not a viable platform for games.

Why not?

The usual answer is "performance", but that's a non-answer. Not all games need cutting edge levels of performance, web performance for accelerated graphics is actually pretty good as once a shader is on the GPU there's very little practical difference between web and native, and most importantly nothing pushes performance to improve quite like developers trying to maximize performance. If we don't try to make web games (or any other performant apps) then there's no reason for browser vendors to work on improving the situations where things are slow.

If Godot's devs think web is an interesting and fun thing to target then they absolutely should be making tools like this.

thejosh• 5 years ago

I've seen a lot of people comment that they would love these for students, as their computers are locked down and they can't do much. Even trying to get the latest versions of the software installed is a burden if they DO manage to get the software installed.

This unlocks so much, in terms of being able to build games via the web browser without students needing to download software is pretty amazing.

hiccuphippo• 5 years ago

Not everything has a business perspective. Sometimes people build things for fun or to learn something.

techlaw3• 5 years ago

The web is reliably the best platform for the games our nonprofit produces. And we've produced dozens of them played by young people around the world for the past 15 years. (Yes, we've had setbacks with deprecation of Flash and Unity Web Player but webGL has been fantastic.)

Although the games are also available through the appstores or for direct download, those channels are not as accessible for many people, especially those on the other side of the digital-divide. No smartphone, tablet, or home PC? Then turn to the web instead: our evidence-based and award-winning games are used by educators in classrooms, by parents at home, and by young people who access them via public libraries.

The web is the best outlet for these games because it is by far the most accessible of platforms. These games are also much safer from a privacy perspective via the web than installing an always-on & always-tracking game from Google Play.

And though these are not AAA games and they don't include microtransactions or advertisements that merely means nobody is getting rich from them. But that isn't our goal. Our goal is to drive positive change in the most efficient way possible.

Genuinely free video games via the web is how to safely reach and empower hundreds of thousands of young people around the world about issues important to them.

swebs• 5 years ago

It was probably easier to do this than port the editor to iPad/Android.

carwyn• 5 years ago

It means the developers are dogfooding their WASM support as Godot runs on top of its own engine.

Also excellent for ease of adoption with beginners due to zero install overhead.

flohofwoe• 5 years ago

AFAIK this is the desktop version compiled to WASM, not a completely separate project.

TheMagicHorsey• 5 years ago

Its much easier to have educational content about an engine if you can run tutorials directly in the web browser. Don't underestimate the importance of this for producing accessible educational content about an engine at scale.

JamesBaxter• 5 years ago

Anything that helps the web export progress sounds like a good idea to me, I think there’s a lot of potential in that feature.

Being able to play game demos in the browser before installing the full version if you like it would be nice.

But for developers themselves I think it would be really cool to see the output of the tutorial you’re following before you start. It would be pretty motivating to see what’s coming and I think it could help get across some of the concepts which can be difficult in game dev.

nacs• 5 years ago

Agreed, there's a lot of potential for Web export across all engines. This was one thing Flash did really well back in the day but now JS + Webgl can surpass that as long as creatives are given a nice tool to create with it.

Unity's WebGL export is a good start too but the bundle size is huge (they did release a leaner, pared down version but it's still got a ways to go in terms of load speed).

isodev6• 5 years ago

I tried to preview the example but apparently it doesn't work with my browser. The web needs to do better.

adventured• 5 years ago

Which browser?

isodev6• 5 years ago

Safari

TomGullen2• 5 years ago

(Disclosure, am founder of Construct 3, we made a browser based game engine: https://editor.construct.net)

Interesting to see this progress, and unlike the myriad of other web based software looks like they've done a pretty good job of making it feel native like in the browser. I don't feel too threatened by Godot's progress here, fortunately our engine occupies a fairly specific niche that doesn't overlap too much with Godot's market and would allow them to co-exist.

It does look a little heavy (12.5mb transferred/77mb resources to load cold) and is slower to load than I would expect. Doesn't appear like HTTP2 is supported which would probably speed things up nicely.

For anyone wondering what's the point of this, browser based software is incredibly beneficial to educational institutes especially in the Covid environment - we for example are getting educational institutes who typically use Unity and other software moving to us because it's far easier to get remote classrooms set up with their wide variety of devices students have at home.

I do think the future of software is in the browser. There are just so many advantages. Not to everyone's liking of course but I do feel it's inevitable. We went web only as it has the huge advantage of one code base to maintain, I would assume a large risk on Godot's part here is having to maintain multiple code bases.

cycloptic7• 5 years ago

I am not sure why you would feel threatened even if there was overlap. Godot is MIT licensed, so if your customers started asking for features from Godot or for compatibility with Godot, you could just copy the code straight from them without any hassle.

aflag4• 5 years ago

Sadly, software is not (usually) that composable. If godot is a better engine all around, it would mean that competitors could offer a better service by just running godot in the cloud and charge per access, which they may be able to do for a cheaper price as they had very low initial investment.

vvanders2• 5 years ago

As someone who's worked in AAA game engines this is like saying because C# is now open source it will be easy to just copy code into Swift without any hassle.

The part that makes game engines both interesting and difficult is they made a series of discrete trade-offs to support the use cases of the types of games they ship. This is true from tooling workflows to rendering stacks to core engine layout like if they do heavy arena allocation or more open world dynamic entities.

We extended the engine we licensed with some fairly reasonable features and even doing the uplevel was a brutal, 4-6 month process to reconsile those changes.

fartcannon2• 5 years ago

Isn't the future of applications on the browser only possible because the current browser leader (Google) isn't actively fighting cross OS support? Because what's a browser if not a universal front end for widgets. We could have had cross platform widgets but that would have made it too hard to monopolize one platform. Google have simply abstracted the previous platform leader (Microsoft) advantage away from them.

It's interesting, but depressing that we keep letting these greedy humans lock us into things. We keep wasting time fighting them and each other.

chme• 5 years ago

I think vendor-lock-in is something that should probably be made illegal by consumer protection laws.

lukasbuenger• 5 years ago

While technically somewhat a valid concern, vendor lock in on an OS level has never been Googles MO. Quite the opposite actually: The more the merrier. Every Google service (Maps, Docs, Mail, Drive, Calendar, Analytics Admin etc ppt) works in all major browsers. You might get the best out-of-the-box UX with their offerings in Chrome because authentication/authorisation is handled on an app level, but other than that there's really nothing stopping you from using, say, their spreadsheets in Safari. The fact that they kind of own TC39 while also actually owning the browser with the largest market share is not optimal on many, many levels, but, frankly, the risk of them pushing a hard lock in on any level, to me, is negligible. They're monetising telemetry and ultimately don't care where that's coming from.

Edit: Typo and Grammar

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

Hope this turns into the prodigal open source flash replacement.

CharlesW• 5 years ago

There's a good open source Flash runtime called ruffle.rs, used by Internet Archive.[1]

(Wasn't sure what "prodigal" means in this context. Any chance you means "canonical"?)

[1] http://blog.archive.org/2020/11/22/flash-back-further-though...

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

By flash replacement, I do not mean simply something that can play flash; I mean also an editor simple enough to be used by artists.

By prodigal, I mean that this is something FLOSS enthusiasts have been waiting for literally decades.

Carnageous• 5 years ago

I love this! Not sure why you would need this, as the desktop app seems to be a lot more performant, but am a big fan of offering everything as a webapp.

Godot Engine Web Editor

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