Godot Engine open sourced

The site is totally hammered right now but I managed to grab a copy and get a feel for what's in this. There's some truly exciting stuff to comb through since it's a well-used engine with a lot of history, not someone's hobby hack.

What I've seen so far:

A custom scripting language(GDScript) which is roughly Python-esque. The wiki explains that after trying the other common choices(Lua, Squirrel, Angelscript) over a period of years, they rolled their own solution that could be more closely integrated to the engine.

An in-editor help, it has some API docs.

Classes for GUI controls, including layout containers.

A fairly rich audio API, including positional audio, streamed audio, common sample playback controls(pan, volume, pitch, looping), and some effects(reverb, chorus, frequency filter).

Some networking functionality, including HTTP, TCP, and UDP(unclear?) mechanisms.

Keyboard, joystick, mouse, and touchscreen input classes.

And of course lots of rendering and physics-related stuff, including various shapes, cameras, meshes, sprites, animation, tilemaps, texture atlasing, internationalized fonts, particle systems, and multiple viewports.

eropple4• 12 years ago

It looks pretty neat. I'm leery about their custom scripting language, but it at least sounds pretty bulletproofed. I'm interested in how much (if any) of the lower layers of their system are separated out from the higher ones; I'm more interested in how those layers could be used with my own engine than theirs itself.

SomeCallMeTim8• 12 years ago

I get frustrated with people who think they can and should rewrite the scripting language.

I'm more interested in how those layers could be used with my own engine than theirs itself.

You and me both. Also looking at Proton [1] and Allegro [2] for similar reasons. And just came across a Blackberry-backed engine [3] which looks interesting (and also Lua-driven).

I actually have my OWN game engine (based on LuaJIT, thank you ;) that already targets Windows, Android, and iOS, but I'd like to rip out the platform layer and replace it with something that someone else is maintaining. I mean, it works now, but leveraging open source and other developers' efforts would be much better.

I've considered just using SDL 2.0 and calling it good, but I'm tempted to pick up some of the higher-level functionality some of these other engines offer.

None offer all the features I want, unfortunately. One of the big features they mostly miss is really good script/C++ cross-functionality. Aside from that, there are typically one or two other things that make me want to avoid them.

[1] http://www.rtsoft.com/wiki/doku.php?id=proton

[2] http://alleg.sourceforge.net/

[3] http://www.gameplay3d.org/

kevingadd• 12 years ago

One specific reason why they rolled a custom scripting language is that they needed vector/matrix types (i.e. vector3f, etc) exposed to scripts, and adding those through an interface like cpython or lua's embedding api would have produced scripts that were incredibly slow at manipulating vectors. Presumably luajit might have fixed this, but I can understand that they didn't go that far.

kmavm• 12 years ago

Torch seems to be a concrete example of a numerically oriented luajit embedding that provides high performance linear algebra primitives. http://torch.ch/

oscargrouch2• 12 years ago

Yeah.. luajit and its amazing ffi module to the rescue here..

eropple4• 12 years ago

AngelScript can use them directly, though. Perhaps it was too immature when they made the decision.

azakai• 12 years ago

Another interesting feature is the wide range of target platforms:

One-Click deploy to several platforms, such as Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, BB10 and HTML5.

malbs3• 12 years ago

Just playing around with this.... cross platform, doesn't try and be a "no programming required" environment, GDScript looks good enough. Whole env is intuitive. The live docs are decent. A couple of minutes in and I'm already making something. This is pretty damned cool!

ekianjo• 12 years ago

I've seen that the editor only runs on OpenGL 2.1 supported platforms, but can it compile games for OpenGLES platforms?

pavlov3• 12 years ago

Looks that way. There are iOS, Android and BB10 targets in the "platform" directory:

https://github.com/okamstudio/godot/tree/master/platform

lee337• 12 years ago

Their site could maybe use some WP Super Cache :p http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/

This looks amazing!

al_dente• 12 years ago

Or just varnish: https://www.varnish-cache.org

nunodonato• 12 years ago

Downloaded and giving it a try! Amazed that its under 10mb!

wikiburner• 12 years ago

Just curious, does anyone have any recommendations for something similar, but Javascript/HTML5 based?

What would the framework of choice be for a browser-based multiplayer game?

um304• 12 years ago

I'm also curious about this. Ideally I'd like to find an engine which allows to develop a game in browser and then port it into a mobile app. I found this link through Google which lists available JS/HTML5 engines: [https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki/Game-Engines]. It'd be great if anybody can make recommendations out of their experience.

adrianoconnor• 12 years ago

I don't actually have any experience with it, but Monkey X looks like a nice way of creating HTML5 games (and cross platform) quickly: http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/

The guy who coded it wrote the language I first learned to programme on (Blitz Basic, back on the Amiga in 1992 or so).

Has support for most things you'll want (3D, input, sound etc).

TheZenPsycho2• 12 years ago

Phaser, which uses the really awesome pixi.js rendering engine, can read in files from Tiled, the map editor, and Spine animations. No 3d really as such but pixi.js does have a webgl renderer that lets you add in glsl "filters" and has some built in.

hmbg• 12 years ago

It's not there yet, but we're working hard to make it happen at gootechnologies.com. Main focus is 3D games for now, but we're going to attack 2d in early summer.

Right now you can prepare your scenes and do some basic interaction, but to make a full game you'd export the scenes and code javascript directly against our goo engine.

It's still in private beta, but if you PM I might be able to speed things up.

daredevildave• 12 years ago

You might want to take a look at our company PlayCanvas[1]

We've got the game-building stuff covered, with Javascript engine and designer tools.

And a few of our users are pushing the multiplayer part of it e.g.

http://apps.playcanvas.com/playcanvas/scifi/latest

http://boxes.moka.co/

[1]http://playcanvas.com/

archagon• 12 years ago

Looks great! What are the benefits of using this over something like Unity?

EDIT: Sorry if this sounded sarcastic. I was genuinely curious. Always happy to see a new engine out in the open!

SomeCallMeTim8• 12 years ago

No black box? Ability to actually debug problems and change the source when you need? Lack of licensing fees (to support all platforms)?

pjmlp4• 12 years ago

Lets see:

- you are not stuck with .NET 3.5

- you can use Linux as your development environment

- you have the full package, instead of the various SKUs

On the other hand, if you have Unity experience, it is a plus in the industry.

pikachu_is_cool2• 12 years ago

Puts on Richard Stallman cap

Freedom.

virgi1• 12 years ago

Nope. Not GPL-licensed.

Gusfoo_2• 12 years ago

Looks great! What are the benefits of using this over something like Unity?

For my industry (gambling) Unity costs $200K/title. Price gouging IMO but it's their business to charge what they like.

Kiro2• 12 years ago

I had a look at https://store.unity3d.com/products/pricing and I don't understand how it can cost you $200K per title.

Nr7• 12 years ago

Here's a similar project. http://polycode.org/ It's still under development but it's ready enough to start playing around with it.

malbs3• 12 years ago

Polycode looks a little quiet, which is disappointing, it looks really nice.

JelteF• 12 years ago

The screenrewrite branch has commits from 5 hours ago, so it's not really quite in my opinion.

pjmlp4• 12 years ago

Look quite nice. I will surely give it a try.

beefsack• 12 years ago

For those who want to use Sublime Text as the external text editor: https://github.com/beefsack/GDScript-sublime

notastartup• 12 years ago

This looks like a solid product but any reason I should give up my unity3d? It does look much easier to pick up than unity but I wonder what are the benefits of this.

Also, if someone knows where I can find some free assets I can use. I thought of ripping game sprites from old ROM games but stopped at the thought of hypothetical lawyers rising from the dead.

viraptor• 12 years ago

Undead lawyers raising from graves to once again protect the IP they were once working on... I'd like to play that game :)

TheZenPsycho2• 12 years ago

http://opengameart.org

https://github.com/DDR0/open_pixel_platformer

JoeAnzalone• 12 years ago

Lots of goodies here, too:

http://open.commonly.cc/unlocked

http://garage.commonly.cc/#download

http://letsmakegames.org/resources/art-assets-for-game-devel...

jamesbritt• 12 years ago

What I like about Unity is I can write in what is basically JavaScript.

I've not yet tried Godot but I jumped into useful results with Unity following a basic tutorial. I'm impressed by what Unity gives you right out of the box.

frik• 12 years ago

You mean UnityScript. It's not JavaScript!

  Though many in the Unity development community (and even
  in the Unity corporation) refer to UnityScript and 
  JavaScript as if they were equivalent or interchangeable, 
  the two are very different languages. Though they 
  resemble each other syntactically, they have very 
  different semantics.

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/UnityScript_versus_JavaScr...

klrr• 12 years ago

Is there any IRC channel for this project?

negamax• 12 years ago

Look at the end of error codes. Gold

https://github.com/okamstudio/godot/blob/master/core/error_l...

tantalor• 12 years ago

Actual usage here,

https://github.com/okamstudio/godot/blob/0b806ee0fc9097fa7bd...

moron4hire3• 12 years ago

The problem with these things is, they show you screenshots of the types of games you can supposedly make, but that is literally nothing to do with the game engine itself. That's art assets, which are a whole other ball of wax.

Most of these games, the programming itself is trivial. If you can't hack it together in Java without a game engine, then you're not going to be able to hack it together in the game engine.

If you want to make casual indie games that look great, you need to be focusing on your artwork, and how to make artwork that works well in games.

And for the love of god, do not neglect sound until the last minute. Good sound in a game can be as complex to create and program as graphics. You absolutely must develop it in tandem with the rest of your program. We are so focused on visuals, but bad sound will ruin a game more certainly than bad visuals, just as bad sound will ruin a movie more certainly than bad camera work. Bad visuals could be a stylistic choice, but bad sound never is.

Legend5• 12 years ago

Any suggestions on where to start with the artwork for a complete newbie? I'm very interested in game programming but the artwork has somewhat discouraged me for quite a bit.

moron4hire3• 12 years ago

3D: get Blender and focus on learning it. Treat it like learning a programming language. You get out of it as much as you put in. The only reason people don't use Blender is because it's not 3DSMAX or Maya and that was what they used in college, so that is what they've spent the most time on. Blender is much better now than 10 years ago. It was garbage 10 years ago, but I've done real work in it and found it to be quite easy to use even 2 years ago.

2D: study cartooning. Buy a Wacom tablet. Suck it up and buy Photoshop and Illustrator.

Adobe Creative Cloud membership is $50/mo, which is basically the price of Photoshop alone in a year, but gets you access to everything.

Audio: I started using Audition because of the CC membership, and it's been great (I've also put together a few, simple videos with Premiere because of CC). I find Audition is actually kind of fun to use.

Get yourself a drum machine of some kind. I have one of the older Korg Kaossilators, a handheld device that runs on batteries. The new ones are even better. I plug the headphone jack into the microphone jack of my computer and I record directly into Audition. Making serviceable music for games is quite easy with it. Just remember that less is more when it comes to music, and don't be afraid to do non-traditional stuff, off beat, dissonant. It's easy to make and creates much more atmosphere.

Neither I was able to figure out on my own, but they were all quite easy to use after reading a few tutorials on them.

Just remember, treat it like programming. You're not going to get it overnight.

unoti• 12 years ago

You should take a look at Unity. There is a wealth of assets available for free or astoundingly cheap on their store.

Legend5• 12 years ago

I have never done game programming. Can anyone recommend whether it is easier to pick this up compared to Unity? Also, isn't Unity expensive [edit: for a newbie]?

CmonDev• 12 years ago

Let me Google this for you: https://store.unity3d.com/

Legend5• 12 years ago

Sorry! Made an edit to my post. I wanted to ask if there was a cheaper way to learn game programming than investing so much in Unity upfront. Thanks for the pointers anyways.

j_s• 12 years ago

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/7720/is-unity-really-fr...

Unity Free is free for any individual to use

Feature comparison: http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses

Legend5• 12 years ago

+1 Superb! I was not aware of this at all! Thank you so much.

doyoulikeworms• 12 years ago

This looks awesome!

Sorry to go off on a tangent. I've only been into (indie) game development for the last year or so.

It looks to me like game development has lagged behind web development by decade or so in terms of the democratization of tools. Free (as in beer) and open source game development software have grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. Unity, GameMaker, Unreal/UDK, Anarchy, many many others have become both viable and available.

In the 90's and early naughts, did web developers regularly write their own servers, templating engines, databases, and all else that goes into web development? Didn't game developers more-or-less have to write the whole thing from scratch or license an expensive engine?

These are not rhetorical questions. I'd love to hear the perspective of someone more knowledgeable than me.

munchbunny• 12 years ago

Web development has stayed pretty democratic since the early days because there is a small number of people pushing technological boundaries while the vast majority work in a well understood space.

Game development has consistently been the opposite: in a race to better graphics, better physics, bigger and better everything, game complexity has only gone up. Companies are working with tech that is not open to access by "mere mortals" because they are often proprietary hardware from Microsoft/Sony/AMD/nVidia. As a result of the technological arms race, there is a LOT of platform fragmentation in the graphics world.

So the problem is that game development is consistently a "big team" task, and industry expertise is monopolized by companies. Tech trickles down very slowly to hobbyists, so while there are engines for the rest of us to use, they don't benefit from the kind of industry battle-testing that web technologies get.

Game engines like Unity and Godot seem to be changing this a little bit by simplifying game development - standardizing complexity by abstracting away low level optimization concerns that you'd really only care about when you need to push technological boundaries. But in general the concept of "convention over configuration" and its related ideas hasn't really caught on, so there isn't even a standard way of thinking about game engines.

The last thing to consider is how much more complex games are than web. Web is mostly a mixture of 2-D graphics and user input handling code. Games are often 3-D graphics (3-D is just much harder than 2-D), often have more algorithmically complex input problems, require audio, and sometimes require real-time networking for multiplayer (web can tolerate latency better). There's just a lot more in there.

Another problem: because of performance requirements, the vast majority of the core libraries for physics, graphics, etc. are written in C++. C++ is not easy to pick up.

S4M• 12 years ago

Has anybody managed to run it on linux? I must be missing something obvious, but I don't know what to do once I downloaded it. Running `upx -d godot_x11.64` as mentioned on the download page doesn't do anything.

recentdarkness• 12 years ago

I had no problems. the upx command is only decompressing it. you'd have to do: `chmod a+x godot_x11.64` then you can run it with ` ./godot_x11.64`

hpcorona• 12 years ago

Wow this engine is really amazing... Need to start stressing it out to se What's its made of...

Congrats

Godot Engine open sourced

Related Stories