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Comment by speps | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking "why not use bgfx?", thankfully it's already been discussed: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/19602

However, the arguments against bgfx seem to amount to "I want to do it myself", a classic "not invented here" issue.

EDIT: found this too https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-renderer-design-expl...

> Added to that fact, Vulkan still has years to go until it's properly supported in most desktop and mobile platforms, which makes it unattractive to implement for us (as it means considerably more effort to write, debug and maintain).

And then they're talking about the Vulkan PI in TFA which probably won't be ready for some time too...

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> However, the arguments against bgfx seem to amount to "I want to do it myself", a classic "not invented here" issue.

I disagree. It has been 9 months since that post. bgfx still does not list support for Vulkan. They already implemented DX12 and Metal. They still claim support for Windows XP and Vista. Godot says it will get Vulkan support in 3.2 which comes out in a few months. Otherwise they would have to wait and work on bgfx to get it working. DX9, XP, Vista, feels like a lot of baggage for what Godot is right now. A very quick and easy to use game editor that easily deploys on both Win and Linux.

Also, your edit links to a pretty outdated article (2017).

See Godot's about face on Vulkan here:

https://godotengine.org/article/abandoning-gles3-vulkan-and-...

> Vulkan was always a tempting alternative to solve them and to ensure we are much safer from driver bugs (after all, this is what the API was intended for). Still, the lack of support on macOS made it unappealing. Having to write a Metal backend to support this OS is a lot of effort for a platform not used very much.

> in a completely unexpected turn of events, it seems Valve has found an arrangement with the developers of MoltenVK (the commercial and proprietary Vulkan over Metal wrapper), ported Dota 2 to it, and got it open sourced.

> It seems to be a mostly complete Vulkan implementation that runs on macOS and iOS. This pretty much lifts the only barrier we had for moving Godot to it.

It maybe reasonable at first glance, but when you start using a library you will hit a roadblock eventually especially if you are working on the lower-level things.

If you need something from the library that it doesn't have you will either implement it yourself, create a PR, wait for it to be merged or work around it (which defeats the purpose of using a library).

So much of a game engine is how it's rendering works. It interacts with everything else. I don't think it's an unreasonable thing for a game engine to want to implement themselves.

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