Godot 3.2 beta 1 | Hacker News Reader

Godot 3.2 beta 1

godotengine.org

149 pointsbbmario39 comments

I have been using Godot since recently and I sincerely think that Godot has one of the finest programming experiences, not only for games, but for any kind of visual programming.

It is easy and has a flexibility that is unmatched, and some things that are cumbersome to do in other engines are a breeze to do here.

I sincerely recommend that anyone with a mild interest try it, it only is a 60mb download with no installation needed, it comes with its own text editor and docs, so it comes with everything you need to start tinkering.

Godot found a way to merge visual programming and OOP so well. You just drag a little node of whatever type into the scene and can attach code to it. All the node types are essentially classes with useful methods predefined. That plus their Signals system for messaging between nodes makes it so easy to do whatever you want.

I've made 2 very small 3d games in Godot with basically 0 experience in graphics or gaming programming each in a weekend.

I cannot really compare Godot to Unity or Unreal but it was such a good experience to use that I don't see a point in trying the others.

Seriously hats off to the Godot contributors

That's also how Unity works.

> it comes with its own text editor

You were listing off so many positive features, I'm glad you included a negative as well.

FWIW you can easily open up the text files in VS Code. Last time I was messing with it, I tried to find a way to integrate it more, and I think you can set it as the editor's default text editor.

Godot supports editing in external editors far more seamlessly than Unity, in my experience. You don't ever need to use the built-in editor.

There is now a language server which facilitates the use of 3rd-party editors like VS Code.

I don't know if there's anything approximating release notes for 3.2 yet, but one big feature I'm aware of is support for Oculus Quest. Most people are using Unity and Unreal for that, so it's good to see an open alternative.

EDIT: Should have read more carefully, the post links a preliminary changelog https://gist.github.com/Calinou/49aefe52ce8f67ffa3f743932123...

Now we just need an open alternative to the Oculus Quest.

It's far from an OSS platform, but it's at least much better than the PS4/XB1/Switch ecosystem. Anybody can sign up for a free developer account and sideload software to it.

And if someone else makes a more open standalone VR headset I'm sure Godot will support it ASAP.

"Whatabout these other worse ecosystems" isn't the strongest argument. At least those other ecosystems are in competition with each other, whereas the standalone VR market only has Quest. I invested years of my life developing a VR game, and despite a number of customers begging to be able to buy it on Quest, and despite having developed a custom Quest version, there is a company sitting between us saying "no."

I'm not arguing that it's a good situation, I'm just saying that's how it is and at least it's not worse. Betting your game isn't on PSVR either?

Have you considered putting it up for sale through itch.io? There are some Quest games on there, Air Brigade for example.

I would actually love to put it up for sale through itch.io, but what happens when someone actually buys the game? They have to lie to Oculus and say they're a developer, and we all have to hope that Facebook doesn't Alter The Deal. I wouldn't trust that arrangement after taking someone's money, and I won't give the game out for free either.

Really the answer here is competition. If Quest had a competitor, I could take my game there and tell customers to buy that product instead. But it would be even better if the competition was open source.

Maybe the best you can do is price it low to account for the risk, and put big warnings that it'll only work as long as Facebook continues to allow side-loading. If people still want to buy it, that's on them.

Looked at your profile and I assume we're talking about Soundboxing?

Did Oculus give any feedback on why they won't put it in the store? Looking at your website, I'm thinking it makes heavy use of user-created tracks with the audio being pulled from YouTube (based on the VEVO thumbnails)? Is YouTube ok with that kind of embedding?

The Quest store just put Synth Riders up this week, so clearly it's not a complete ban on games that play unlicensed user-sequenced tracks. But those have to be loaded into a folder on the device from your computer instead of "HAND MADE CHALLENGES" with a Daft Punk song prominently featured in the marketing material.

No, in the many discussions I've had with Oculus, they've not given me a solid reason. If you talk to other developers, it is apparently their policy not to give feedback.

My game embeds a full browser, and can navigate to YouTube pages - it really is a full browser though, showing ads and dutifully registering tracking impressions and everything. But the browser is actually just background noise, the actual challenge is a motion captured artistic performance, and that drives everything in the game - this is well-protected by fair use.

The browser state is just made to sync up with that performance, and the side-effect is that, if the creator of the mocap moved reasonably in line with the music, you feel as if you're moving to the music too, when in fact you're actually interacting with the motion capture.

You might consider feeling out r/oculusquest to see if people would be interested. Or maybe a limited free itch.io version that's restricted to a defined YouTube playlist?

There's a pretty big crowd of people in that community set up for sideloading. Main reasons being Beat Saber mods, Pavlov beta, Tea for God, Virtual Desktop with SteamVR streaming, and probably others that I'm forgetting.

Good progress on Vulkan support.

Meanwhile Unreal engine removed parallelized Vulkan renderer item from their future plans:

https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux

Does it mean they won't work on it anymore?

Godot was great when I tried it, it’s much simpler and nicer to use than Unity for 2d games.

The cons were there are some minor Mac IDE bugs (seems like maintainers mainly use Linux), but the biggest issue is the godot plugin ecosystem is much smaller than the unity plugin ecosystem and writing native bindings e.g. for an ad sdk is non-trival and you’d have to do it for each platform and each external sdk you integrate with.

The plugins were new to Godot 3 if I'm not mistaken so I'm not surprised.

So I tried Godot recently for 3D, and it seems pretty interesting. Followed some tutorials, made some basic FPS controls and movement. Checked out some other demos, etc.

However it's surprising that no serious 3D game has ever been made with it, except a few demos. Why is this the case? I already noticed some sound issues in heavily scripted demos, is this engine very limited for 3D?

I'd say it's because Godot has only recently started gaining traction (probably around it's 3.0 release) and still doesn't have huge tutorial/asset community that Unity and Unreal have. Plus while 3.0 really helped how Godot renders 3D if you already know Unity/Unreal, why bother switch?

I only dabble in game dev, but a few of my friends are far more interested in it. Whenever I've asked them to consider switching they're pretty entrenched in the Unreal or Unity and don't see convincing arguments yet.

There are a couple of them, though it depends on what you consider "serious" or not.

I think Godot as it is now is reasonably capable for 3D (adequate for what most small indie devs would want to do at least) but it is definitely behind Unity/Unreal in featureset, performance, and availability of 3rd party modules. And of course everybody has already spent years learning the other engines. 4.0 should be bringing a lot of major features and big performance improvements but that's a fair bit away.

i.e. https://store.steampowered.com/app/992860/Intrepid/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/467090/A_Game_of_Changes/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/818620/Music_Boy_3D/

https://victordelima.itch.io/way-out

still in development: https://store.steampowered.com/app/824090/TailQuest_Defense/

Aside from the fact that it's relatively new compared to other engines, 3D performance isn't quite up to par with other engines yet. I think people are too critical about this, and to be clear, 3D is perfectly capable of doing good looking small-medium games, but you'll definitely run into issues if you're trying to do something very high-end.

Vulkan support is currently being worked on and will be added in Godot 4.0, which will come with many performance improvements as well.

Godot is a fun engine but it’s not ready for serious production of 3D games beyond those with very minimal assets and gameplay. Graphically it’s fine but not great, performance is an issue. They went down a rabbit hole of rewriting their rendering engine several times and the latest iteration is supposedly better on the vulkan pipeline. However the real barrier to development is the rest of the system. This shift in focus and new-feature-syndrome has led to stagnation in other parts of the engine that affect usability when developing a 3D game. There’s an issue in the tracker called “everything wrong with godot in one video” or something where someone goes over all the usability issues they had with the 3D engine. AFAIK a lot of those things didn’t get addressed and the issue is still open. Not enough priority is given to ergonomics and usability and most focus is given to new features such as graphics. Tooling is critical in game dev and godot falls just short of being professional grade that it’s heart breaking. Minor cuts and inconveniences everywhere plus poor graphics performance just add up to be too much of a hinderance to actually build a game. But hey, at least they implemented global illumination right?

An interesting question to address is whether there is space for developing a low price commercial version of Godot. What feature would you be willing to pay for?

Documentation and templates and placeholder assets.

Can you be more specific? Documentations: tutorials, a book like learn godot in 24x7, or a set of tutorials= Templates: mini-games, reusable piece of logic? Placeholder assets: can you provide some examples?

Thanks

I would love to see the in-editor documentation improved. Maybe have in-editor tutorials as well, or a book? That would be awesome.

I would also like to see a set of templates that can be used to actually develop a commercial or finished game. The examples that Godot currently ships with are very nice but all are pretty far from being a template, nevermind a real game.

As for assets, I would want to see lots of 3D props, a 3D "player" actor with animations, maybe textures and skyboxes.

Parent might mean export templates. Godot has export templates to build games for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, macOs, and HTML5. But there are also third-party companies that offer export templates for PS4, Xbox One, and Switch.

I appreciate and have used a few of the export templates, and they're great! I have even created my own based on an existing one. The process isn't so bad.

I've been waiting for this.

Godot is a game engine.

Last time I evaluated it to do casual games Godot was lacking production ready ads component. Is it now something fulfilled?

Lacking an ad component is a feature, not a bug.

This isn't a helpful comment. Ads are a fact of the current game industry. It's a valid critique

If it supports ads, shouldn't it also support microtransactions, shareware keys, Steam/GOG/Epic integration, etc? There are a lot of monetization paths, why should ads get special support?

Fair enough, but saying the engine not having ads is a feature is not productive. If it's out of scope, it's out of scope, but that's not what you said

I believe Godot is still lacking an ads component, yes - it's an open-source game engine, and ads aren't really a priority for the development team. Which, of course, means there's a gap in the market for an easy-to-use capable ad plugin, I guess...

I had never heard of godot before. When I clicked this link, I was expecting something golang related (possibly something that processes dot)...

how wrong I was.

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