Godot as an Embeddable Game Engine

https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2024/Apr-23.html

by goranmoomin • 2 years ago

110 37 2 years ago

hannofcart• 2 years ago

Have been using Godot via the excellent Gdext Rust wrapper. It's all smooth sailing except for one issue: if a Rust signal initiated trigger calls into Godot and that in turn (via callbacks/signals whatever) calls back into Rust, it crashes because of Rust ownership rules.

Of course there are workarounds to circumvent this but they are a bit clunky.

Have been following Miguel de Icaza's work on Swift Godot and am really tempted to switch. Swift feels like an ideal language for game dev: type safe to allow frequent refactoring, a simple but effective (enough) memory management mechanism, good performance...

And de Icaza spearheading this makes it more compelling still. The guy takes on rather tricky engineering problems and sees it to completion.

dartos7• 2 years ago

Why not just use gdscript? Or C++

As someone who likes lower level languages (like rust) I find gdscript to cover all my needs (since 2017)

guitarlimeo• 2 years ago

Or C#, that has official support and Slay the Spire 2 is apparently coded with it.

gaogao• 2 years ago

Yeah, you can totally use both gdscript / C#, as well as C/C++/Rust for targeting performance sensitive objects, like doing heavy simulations, since gdscript / C# will still be often simpler for glue code and light-weight signal handling. I think people misunderstand that this is less Rust bindings for the engine and more so like producing plugins/mods for the engine to import.

For why Rust vs. C++, Rust is often able to handle embedded invariants through the type system, while in C++ you'd need to juggle them in your head, which scales a bit poorly through time or number of people working on the project. That said one thing that doesn't match well is the Godot is very inheritance based, which is a bit of an impedance mismatch for using Rust, but I've found gdext to translate these things into composition well enough.

TillE• 2 years ago

Writing an entire complex game in GDScript sounds like an absolute nightmare.

It's a fine scripting language for hobby games or glue code. I would never do serious software development with it.

Buttons840• 2 years ago

it crashes because of Rust ownership rules

Ownership rules exist only at compile time and are not the reason it crashes at runtime.

logicprog• 2 years ago

Unless it's using e.g. RefCells to enforce them at runtime

remram4• 2 years ago

Ownership rules describe an invariant that needs to be upheld both at compile time and run time for Rust code to function.

justinclift2• 2 years ago

Wonder if it would be feasible to create a Godot extension for Firefox/Chrome/etc, so people can share Godot authored content?

Something like a flash authoring and deployment used to be.

netruk44• 2 years ago

Godot can export to HTML 5 natively. I’ve made a simple “web app” this way to share a work in progress app to some friends.

justinclift2• 2 years ago

Cool, didn't realise it was already a thing that works well. Thanks. :)

zer0tonin• 2 years ago

You can already play thousands of game made with godot in your browser: https://itch.io/games/made-with-godot/platform-web

swiftcoder• 2 years ago

Brings back memories of doing the same with Ogre to support embedding Ogre scenes in android UI elements for the Amazon Fire Phone. Sadly not open-sourced at the time, so lost to corporate bullshit.

alexgolive• 2 years ago

It's a post from the future - "Posted on 23 Apr 2024". That's 9 days from now.

skrebbel• 2 years ago

Most things De Icaza works on are from the future so it fits.

geon• 2 years ago

So it can be used as a library now. How was it used before?

icang8882• 2 years ago

Twsliv

icang8882• 2 years ago

Twslive

Godot as an Embeddable Game Engine

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