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Comment by thrillgore | Hacker News Reader

Godot is also behind the curve on content pipeline tools. I love it to death, but I would never be able to convince anyone outside hobbyists to use it because it has no goddamn FBX support, or an easy ECS framework.

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Native FBX support is not compatible by license, you are free to make a module that lets Godot use FBX, just with a FBX compatible license.

Traditional ECS doesn't fit with Godot's philosophy, but you can make behaviors into nodes and just add these nodes as a child for ECS-like behavior. Honestly, I find Godot's way more natural and extendable.

Is there a blog post that goes into this ECS vs nodes paradigm?

There is this [0] overview that looks into OOP as a whole and puts Godot and other game engines into it

[0] https://willnationsdev.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/godots-node-...

Without a stable and widely used model format making a game is impossible. You can drag&drop FBX into Unity and Unreal, and its mostly ready for use. Having a broken FBX importer is just a waste of time. You start with a model format, something works, you build a workflow, a system for producing content en masse, and then at some point you must consider throwing away the model format, the workflow and/or the whole engine, because the importer is unreliable. Or you try to rewrite it yourself, further wasting time. Some things must be rock-solid, open-source or not.

Godot doesn't have any broken importers, yet alone FBX which it doesn't have completely for legal reasons. Looking at Collada(.dae) Blender has a super broken exporter, so broken that Godot folks wrote a better one from the frustration. GLTF2 doesn't have enough support, even though it's a good format.

The problem is that everyone is just sitting and using proprietary FBX format and don't work towards new open standards like Collada or GLTF2.

Sorry but saying "Godot is fine, everything else is broken" isn't really acceptable. If I were to start a 3D project only to find out that importing models didn't work in the game engine I chose, I would move on immediately.

In all honesty (without knowing the specifics of what is broken, I've only ever worked on FBX importers), if Godot want to be taken seriously then they need to be able to import without plugins, warts and all.

Fortunately, I have been able to do most of what I want with Blender and Better Collada. But I know that lack of FBX support pretty much makes it a non-starter outside of hobby projects. This also has to factor into a significant labor base that knows Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, Lumberyard...

Hopefully some of the Unity exodus helps Godot along with more contributors.

The issue, of course, is most of the people using Unity are using it because they don't have the ability (or time) to write the functionality Unity provides themselves.

There will be higher skilled devs who are using Unity that are appalled by this business practice and will want to move to a more open platform.

Unless there's an incentive for them to share their contributions back to Godot (like a paid plugin store, of which at least one is in development) they won't stay.

And no, I am not talking about the Asset Library.

If that was true, then no open source software would ever get released.

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