Brian Bucklew Porting Caves of Qud from Unity to Godot

Also, for 2D, it is sooooo much easier to implement. No messing around with orthographical cameras, no tilemaps appearing with random lines, colours, etc. And 2D performance exceeds Unity's.

wizzledonker• 3 years ago

I regret the years I spent with Unity

Any non-trivial feature that Unity has where Godot lacks is usually re-implemented by bigger developers anyway. For Indie developers, these features are almost never necessary.

When developing tools, Godot is far superior. Any support guarantee that Unity provides is easily bested by the ability to inspect the Godot source code without signing an NDA. With the changes in Godot 4, developing add-on tools is easier than ever.

The Godot project is well managed, with pull requests being merged in a timely manner without a loss of overall project quality.

The mass exodus to Godot is perfectly timed. Godot 4 just released with many changes and improvements, addressing almost all the usual pain points between the two engines (especially in 3D).

raxxorraxor• 3 years ago

That has once been true for Unity as well. People laughed about it being for gimmicky games that weren't too serious.

I think an engine today is about a lot more than rendering performance and quality. It is about the development pipeline, the tools it comes with and the interfaces to integrate assets and loading those. In that regard Unity offers a lot by now.

They also feature their asset store and whatnot. Of course it will take some time to develop such features for any new engine and it won't come to pass until it reaches a critical mass.

VectorLock2• 3 years ago

Yeah I'd love to see how he goes about achieving the COQ signature look in Godot.

TazeTSchnitzel• 3 years ago

I think this game uses almost entirely its own engine and Unity is just used as a HAL and porting harness, so this is sort of a best case scenario for ease of porting. There's a surprisingly large number of games like this, though they're not representative of most Unity titles of course.

steeleduncan• 3 years ago

Yes, in some interview he mentioned that Qud at the time was running as if it were a console app inside Unity. I don't know if that is still true after their UI overhaul, but if so it always seemed odd not to port it to MonoGame instead and save paying the fees.

VectorLock2• 3 years ago

COQ applies a while bunch of stylistic appliques to the "console" look that may not be possible or at least easy in other game engines.

picadores• 3 years ago

Its the result of almost every component of unity out of the box, being useless longterm. Its a similar thing with android. The operating system is just whats used to load librarys to replace all the things - camera detection, crypto etc. And one day you realize, that the operating system is just that thin metal layer and the bootloader.

mnau• 3 years ago

Could you please be more specific with examples and reasoning?

I don't develop in Unity nor Android, so I am rather curious why is every component useless long term.

gentleman11• 3 years ago

I don’t have a Twitter account. What’s going on?

krapp• 3 years ago

Brian Bucklew ported Caves of Qud from Unity to Godot.

generalpf• 3 years ago

He didn’t finish, he’s still porting it.

lazzlazzlazz2• 3 years ago

If you want more detail you could make a Twitter account.

labster• 3 years ago

The only people joining X in 2023 are right-wingers, trolls, and bots. The chance of someone creating an account on X to learn something new is effectively zero.

savingsPossible• 3 years ago

There are good reasons not to, like the fact that Musk has fired most of the workforce (if you value solidarity with other workers)

crazysim• 3 years ago

i got you!

https://nitter.net/unormal/status/1703163364229161236

ShamelessC3• 3 years ago

Doesn’t load for me

troupo2• 3 years ago

Here's the unrolled thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1703163364229161236.html

chii3• 3 years ago

It seems like because there's so much custom code, rather than editor features, the author might as well use a rendering library instead of the engine.

xena• 3 years ago

They do use a rendering library. It's called "Unity".

evrimoztamur• 3 years ago

When you want to build games for many platforms at once, dealing with platform-specific rendering, sound, and input code just becomes tiring. Having an engine at the base gives you these for free (or at a cost, with Unity).

chii3• 3 years ago

that's what a rendering framework does for you.

A game engine is much more - it includes systems like physics, game object representations (like unity's sort-of-ECS), save/load, animations etc.

osener• 3 years ago

This reminds me of the recent DHH TypeScript kerfuffle. Imagine doing a port like this without static types. Every change you make you have to build, launch, look for a crash. Times like this you are so happy you built things in a more refactorable language and used a good architecture.

wiktor-k• 3 years ago

For lazy people like me I think the "kerfuffle" is https://world.hey.com/dhh/turbo-8-is-dropping-typescript-701...

edem• 3 years ago

If you're interested in how Brian thinks take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U03XXzcThGU I've learned a lot from this back in the day!

Brian Bucklew Porting Caves of Qud from Unity to Godot

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