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Comment by mr_puzzled | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, how does the godot engine compare to Unity and UE4? Is it suitable for AAA studios or are there any major pieces missing?

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It is not ready imo. Someone correct me if I am wrong about any of this.

Their custom scripting language is extremely slow to the point where I wouldn't consider using it.

You can use C#, but if you download the c# version you get a warning on startup which states that this version isnt production ready.

You can use C++, but I found the workflow here awkward, plus they just introduced it with 3.0. They are about to launch 3.1 but this includes breaking changes to the way you use c++, so if you were using it and wanted to upgrade you'd have to rewrite a portion of your code.

Oh, come on, how many compute-intensive things you need to do in a game scripting language? GDscript is fast enough for scripting, C++ is there for the compute-intensive tasks you might do (though most of them are already implemented by the engine).

C# on the other hand, is to attract Unity users that are too lazy to put in 30 minutes to go through GDscript's concepts. It's OK that it's there, but personally I found C# one of the least enjoyable languages to program in.

Performance is a feature. If you want your game to have as large a playerbase as possible, it needs to perform well even on bad hardware.

I strongly suspect that most people will write their entire game in an engines default language. Especially in this case where the much advertised best alternative (C#) gives you a warning on startup about not being production ready.

Yes, C# is probably integrated due to its success in Unity, but it's a sane choice. I would argue more so than GDScript. C# has better performance, tooling, support, not to mention an existing userbase of people who already know (and I'm sure many of whom like) the language.

Ignoring C#, they cannot be breaking their API for writing native code. I'm not sure if it was a one time thing, or if it will continue going into future releases, but they absolutely need to have stability if they want people to use their engine long term.

GDscript was created to better integrate with Godot's internals, there is a whole section in their FAQ why they didn't use another language[0]

Warnings for C# are there because it's new, and there is not enough resources to support it better. Also C# is not that easy to integrate as it doesn't have most data structures used in game development, so your own have to be made. In the end it changes so drastically that you might just call it a new language.

[0] http://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/about/faq.html#gdscript-w...

We don't know yet if it is suitable for AAA studios yet, as no yet tried. But Unity itself for quite a long time was not suitable for AAA studios, and just quite recently AAA games using Unity popped up. I'd say that Godot has got the essentials, and most of what is missing is pretty easy to add yourself. Maybe the last thing that stops AAA studios from using Godot is that it still uses OpenGL ES 3.0 for rendering, but there is plans to use a new renderer based on Vulkan

> most of what is missing is pretty easy to add yourself

What's missing in Godot?

A common complaint is terrain. It's likely it will be added to the roadmap, but there are already plugins that add it [0]

[0] https://github.com/Zylann/godot_heightmap_plugin

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