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Comment by tekni5 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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/

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.

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?

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