Godot 4.0 Released

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-4-0-sets-sail/

by coppolaemilio • 3 years ago

477 78 3 years ago

This is excellent news! I have been waiting for Godot (hehe) to release this.

The new Vulkan backend is exciting for 3D projects and I am excited to try to dig into the new 2d tilemapping after work.

As well, gotta love experimental Rust support:

With Godot 4, we introduce a new system called GDExtension. By design, it takes the best parts of creating GDNative extensions and writing custom engine modules using high performance languages such as C, C++ or Rust.

danjoredd• 3 years ago

Love that cultured pun

faisal_ksa2• 3 years ago

It might not be relevant to HN. But could you please explain the reference? Why is Godot a joke? I'm familiar with the reference

Buttons840• 3 years ago

What do you mean about Rust? I don't see any special Rust support other than GDExtensions which can be utilized by almost any language.

runevault3• 3 years ago

Yeah it is via GDExtension, note most languages do need to build some level of interface to take advantage of it. Rust already has one though I dunno just how clean the 4.0 version is yet (last looked months ago when they openly said it was a work in progress).

plq• 3 years ago

And that's the exact joke I expected to find when I clicked on this post :)

Anyhoo, kudos to the team for shipping. Building a generic game engine for the global audience is a massive undertaking.

derhuerst• 3 years ago

hummus_bae• 3 years ago

Last time I checked godot did not support web assembly yet. EDIT: it does now. WIll take another look.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable-3.3/web/fundam...

runevault3• 3 years ago

Note you can't use the c# support for web currently, though I believe they are working on that, I wanna say for 4.1. Same for mobile.

projectramo• 3 years ago

I assume someone cracks a “waiting for” joke every time there are is any update from them.

giancarlostoro• 3 years ago

Are you waiting for someone to? :)

xeonax• 3 years ago

I am waiting for Godot 5 now

alphanullmeric• 3 years ago

Why isn’t c++ a first class citizen in a game engine written in c++?

MapsSlaps3• 3 years ago

In my experience, most devs dislike working in C++. (I'm an industry engineer in games. Even the people who like C++ hate C++.)

Maintaining C++ support is expensive for an engine, just like maintaining any language binding. IMO, they should optimize for the most approachable/developer ergonomic language, which C++ definitely is not.

That said, I strongly disagree with their decision to simply build their own language. I think there are many languages that already exist that make better candidates for game development either because they are well known, well supported, or easily portable.

detrites2• 3 years ago

Do you have any specific criticisms of GDScript you'd like to share?

optymizer• 3 years ago

GDScript is basically Python syntax with some sugar.

* Well known: Python is well known. GDScript is thus familiar. * Well supported: it's a first class citizen in Godot, that's all that matters * Easily portable: portable to what? it runs on the Godot engine. That's all the portability it needs.

I think they built their own language because of the integration with their Editor. It's not Lua or JavaScript or Python, but it works well enough for Godot in my experience.

ehutch792• 3 years ago

Not familiar with the codebase, so grain of salt.

It's likely due to being cross platform. What's happening is they're bundling the scripts and assets with a pre-built binary. If you're writing all c++ you're likely going to link in the engine instead, not the paradigm they support. That said I know you can extend the game engine, and there is some kind of plugin support for building native code, but you've got to do compile time support yourself? It even supports Rust now apparently?

ehutch792• 3 years ago

https://godotengine.org/article/introducing-gd-extensions/

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/tutorials/scripting/gdex...

https://github.com/godot-rust/gdextension

jeremyjh• 3 years ago

Godot has always had native module support; the reason it is not more popular is because it is more or less impossible to support a stable C++ ABI across compilers and operating systems. So you have to build Godot yourself for your dev platform and every platform you ship to. That is what GDExtension and the official C++ bindings solve. Once you set up your builds native modules are totally decent, but personally I find it saps productivity compared to GDScsript, and if you only need it for performance critical code then GDExtension is probably fine (I haven’t used it or GDNative, but I did write native modules before those other options existed).

EamonnMR2• 3 years ago

It is inasmuch as you can modify the engine source if you would like to program your game like that. Most engines maintain a distinction between the engine implementation language (usually C++) and scripting (game implementation) language, and Godot is no different.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

It has at the same level as Unreal, via extensions.

Turns out most people doing the actual scripting don't use C or C++, rather tooling designed for game designers, level editors, scripting developers,....

Professional studios rarelly do everything in C++ for the last 20 years.

camdenlock• 3 years ago

Huge quantity of work here. Really stunning.

How is this sustainable through donations alone?

ignaloidas2• 3 years ago

Because people make money using it.

einpoklum• 3 years ago

A bit like LibreOffice, actually - donation-sustained, ecosystem includes commercial companies which use the tech with modifications/extensions, who donate money, new features, bug fixes etc.

TulliusCicero3• 3 years ago

Probably helps that the core devs are in Argentina IIRC. They don't need to pay themselves as much as developers in the states or western Europe (though hopefully their compensation is still more than adequate).

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...

TulliusCicero3• 3 years ago

This is awesome, though I'm unsure whether I should port over my small 3.x C# project right now, or wait for 4.1.

sirodoht• 3 years ago

Any experiences with Godot + M1 macOS?

poisonarena• 3 years ago

works great, I haven't switched to 4 though.

cridenour• 3 years ago

Been using 4 on my M1 with no issues at all.

mos_6502• 3 years ago

I'm on a team that's currently shipping a Godot 3.5.1 game across Linux, macOS (universal), and Windows.

After sorting out a couple minor snags in the build process (particularly around getting cross-compilation to work on Linux in GitHub Actions, and library validation entitlements for code signing), the finished builds work wonderfully on the M1 machines we've tested with.

astlouis44• 3 years ago

Excited for eventual WebGPU support for Godot!

wilg3• 3 years ago

Looking good. Hoping in a couple of years it will be a no-brainer to use instead of Unity.

Geste• 3 years ago

To me, as a hobbyist, it already is a no-brainer.

wilg3• 3 years ago

I'm sure it's great for a lot of things. I've just been using Unity for a super long time and it still has a lot more "batteries included" features. But I'm jealous AF about realtime global illumination.

hesdeadjim2• 3 years ago

They have a looooooong way to go to make it an appropriate tool for large teams, but they are taking all the right steps to reach that hopeful future.

The founders creating a commercial arm of the engine is critical. As a real studio, you need to be able to support consoles and you need to be able to pay someone money to fix broken shit in the engine when you have a scary deadline looming.

apitman• 3 years ago

Been using Godot the past couple months. It's simply a joy to work with. From the single (relatively) lightweight executable model, to the dogfooding of implementing the UI with the engine itself, to the design of GDScript, etc etc. They definitely implement a lot in-house, but reuse existing software where it makes sense.

Every once in a while I use a program where I just feel the authors think about software similarly to the way I do. Godot is one of those.

Thaxll• 3 years ago

GDScript sucks big time. It has not place in an engine, why would anyone ever invent a very inferior language to what already exists.

They should have used C#.

blensor• 3 years ago

Well nobody forces you to use it. You can mix it with other languages, even more so in Godot 4 where languages can be GDExtensions. You can write one script in GDScript and another in C# if you want.

I personally like to use it. It's not perfect but it's a language that's tailored for the task it's doing, namely driving the high level logic of a game engine.

And most importantly it's beginner friendly, so it's pretty nice for people who want to get into programming.

danbolt• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate? I’ve mentioned this in another comment, but I think it’s well suited to the engine’s model.

johnfn• 3 years ago

They should have used C#.

They did...

tom9729• 3 years ago

Personally as a beginner it's nice to have GDScript built-in. You can literally install Godot as a single executable and everything is self contained which vastly simplifies getting started versus Unreal where you have to install Visual Studio. (I have no experience with Unity but I'm assuming you similarly have to install some C# dependencies.)

Their motivations in creating GDScript are explained here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#what-w...

As a programming language it's pretty reasonable. The built-in editor has auto completion and documentation, you can resume from errors. The syntax is basically Python with optional type annotations. Comparing the Godot vs C# examples in the documentation makes me shudder at how much more verbose C# is in comparison.

As others have pointed out you can use C# if you want to. They provide a separate download for it.

theresistor2• 3 years ago

I'm a heavy-duty C++ programmer professionally, but I find GDScript really nice to work with. It's very well natively supported in the Godot editor, and it inherits the syntactic simplicity of Python that makes it very easy to write small programs in it without having to think much about the details of the language.

mixmastamyk2• 3 years ago

Does it share widgets with blender or is this another graphics app reinventing the wheel?

DiggyJohnson• 3 years ago

How does sharing or not sharing widgets with blender make this “another graphics app reinventing the wheel”? Godot is a game engine, not [just] a graphics app.

But yes, Godot 4 directly translates interfaces with .blend files.

TeddyDD• 3 years ago

No, it's custom UI. Blender is GPL, not sure how you would like to use it's code in MIT game engine project.

EamonnMR2• 3 years ago

Been using the Godot 4 beta and RC for my latest project. The new features (especially lambdas) in GDscript have been killer. Congratulations to the Godot team.

schaefer• 3 years ago

Does anyone recommend a good resource for diving into Godot 4.0 as a complete beginner?

I'm talking introductory materials and an overview of the bigger ideas, not (yet) the nuanced details.

runevault3• 3 years ago

If you just want the basics they have a tutorial on site[0], this covers 2d and 3d. The 4.0 Tutorial scene is still pretty barren on youtube, and some of the existing ones may be invalid because of changes that happened over the alphas and betas.

GDQuest is working on updating his content to 4.0 but even with the half off discount that stuff may be a bit pricey if you aren't sure you want to dive into the Godot world (his full compilation of Tutorials was like $379 before discount and individual ones are like $150 before discount).

[0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/

poser-boy2• 3 years ago

Maybe it's too basic, but GD Quest is working on "Learn GDScript from zero" which runs in a browser.

https://github.com/GDQuest/learn-gdscript

theresistor2• 3 years ago

I've been working exclusively with 4.0, but most of tutorials built for 3.5 are pretty easy to carry over. I like HeartBeast's videos, as well as Brando's.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrHQNOyU1q6BFEfkNq2CYMA [2] https://www.youtube.com/@BrannoDev

sarah_eu• 3 years ago

I've been working with it for a few weeks. Developer but no gamedev background. I love it. Very easy, documentation is extensive, good support on the forums. I will agree with others in this thread who've said they don't like GDScript. For me it's not necessarily a problem with the language (although it's not immediately clear how script execution works - each script is attached to a tree node), but rather that it's another thing to learn. Given that, I've used custom modules (module compiled into engine) and GDExtension (module compiled as a shared library). GDExtension is what I wanted, and I can write a game in C++, and have it build quickly.

panza• 3 years ago

Unity-based dev here. This is looking really strong. Impressed with their focus and speed of development.

If I were putting together a small-ish team with 1-3 people today, I'd be more likely to consider jumping onto Godot vs Unity. Godot is closing the gap.

zuluonezero• 3 years ago

Best engine I have used for years - thanks Godot community and tech leads.

poser-boy2• 3 years ago

I wonder if Godot will become the best way to teach introductory programming to students?

It's very easy to create simple toys with Godot, because it has a Python-like scripting and good UI.

tychota• 3 years ago

"en attendant Godot" is no longer a good joke! Nice work!

Godot 4.0 Released

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