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Comment by MrBra | Hacker News Reader

Happy to see this is alive and kicking since it became OS.

I've never had the occasion to deep dive into it, so I wonder, from 10000 feet how does it differentiates from Unity?

It's MIT Licensed, you could take the project compile it, and put a price tag on it as a tool, and it would be legal. You could make a game that makes you millions of dollars and not owe a penny to the developers. You would be considered many nasty things probably, but legally speaking the MIT License would not forbid you doing that. You could also always contribute back. The restrictions of Unity are not the restrictions of Godot. You can make the millions you want to, you can redo the whole engine / tooling however you see fit. Just keep the original copyright notice and remember you have no warranty any of it works basically.

I know a lot of indie game developers that use Unity, and not having access to the source code to understand why something isn't working as expected is a very common complaint. Being able to dive into the code you're building on top of is a super power.

AFAIK, Unity-the-engine still has a vsync bug edit: on Linux that makes running unity games on my laptop burn one of my CPUs at 100% nonstop. It heats the thing up, burns precious battery life, and is doubly infuriating if you're playing a game that should be light on resources, like TIS-100.

This has been an issue for years, and they can't be bothered to fix it.

edit: the reason is obviously that Linux is a small customer base, and you'd only notice this on Linux laptops, which is an even smaller subset. However, for indy developers in niche genres (where in some cases, like TIS-100 for example, you can expect a more significant chunk of Linux users), I think the fact that Linux support supposedly comes for free is one of the reasons to use Unity, making this doubly cynical.

Okay, but then the question becomes: why use Godot over UE4?

UE4 is massive and overkill for 2D games or low-poly 3D, especially if you intend to release on mobile (which Godot is designed to do well). It really depends on what you are trying to do.

Godot is free, open-source software.

Looks like Godot is OpenGL-only, while Unity can also target DirectX up to version 12. That might be a problem if you're targeting XBox, but it's likely not a problem otherwise.

> how does it differentiates from Unity?

you can watch the first video.

"A Closer Look at the Godot Game Engine"

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