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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Reading through the OpenGL support mini-saga, I was left wondering if this can target a Metal/Vulcan/etc., since graphics stacks seem to be fragmenting again.

But the new visual editors look great, and MIDI input is intriguing to me. The only downside (in terms of learning curve) for me, personally, is the proprietary scripting, since I have been put off Unity time and again because of C# (I have been writing more of it over the years, but it feels too convoluted at times) and I would rather do Lua or Python or something else both dynamic and straightforward enough...

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Vulkan is on the roadmap for 4.0 which should arrive in approximately one year.

As for languages, you could try https://github.com/touilleMan/godot-python Godot makes it easy to write modules in various different languages such as Rust, D, C++, etc.

FWIW GDScript is modeled after python. It's a good scripting language overall. The only thing clunky to me is the way they do callbacks, which they call signals.

From what I read their next major goal is shipping Vulcan support.

Graphics stack never stopped being fragmented.

Contrary to urban myths, OpenGL never was a thing on game consoles.

Then OpenGL itself is myriad of optional extensions, driver and GPU quality issues, with around 30 years of history, which means that any GL engine is full of multiple execution paths, hardly any different from supporting multiple APIs.

In any game engine, rendering code is a very tiny portion of the monolith.

They seem to plan more support for optional typing, though, which I would count as a bonus vs Python et al.

For Godot 3.1, optional typing is a parser-only feature. The plan is, afterwards, to include typed instructions in the state machine to greatly optimize performance.

Yes, and typing will help towards AOT compiling and performance, etc., but I would really like to just dive in and write code in a language I already use or that can be shared among engines (there is a lot of Lua code out there in the game dev universe, for instance).

Having to learn another language (no matter how simple) for a specific runtime is the sort of time investment one should ponder carefully (I’ve written code in dozens of languages, and the learning curve until being productive matters a lot when you move across environments, frameworks and runtimes).

Use C# with Godot. I am personally looking forward to F# with Godot. GDScript is close enough to Python for me, I had no problem with if from the start, and it integrates really well with Godot.

Issue is C# is desktop only right now.

That is an additional point I wasn't fully aware of. I've tinkered with Unity and they address every platform with every supported language.

Whereas I can do some desktop animation stuff with Godot without caring much (that's one of the reasons I'm interested in MIDI support), if I were to go beyond the hobby phase I'd definitely target iOS first...

It's on their list, and at the rate that they are moving, it will be there soon. It is based on Mono, so there shouldn't be too much friction there. Unity is good, but for Android and iOS I play with Raylib in C.

Godot now has native bindings for many languages. Search for gdnative and your language of choice.

If you like Lua and game dev, apparently https://www.defold.com/ is the bomb.

I've never used it, but I'm looking into it or godot.

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