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Y-down coordinates still feel weird to me too, but that's a pretty longstanding convention for screen space coordinates:

https://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/ehchua/programming/opengl/images...

(via https://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/ehchua/programming/opengl/CG_Exa...)

Is Unity the odd ball? I've never done any serious game dev but I've done plenty of screen drawing and Y-down is the only convention I've ever come across.

It's more that there isn't a standard, just a bunch of different conventions in different places. Unity is like DirectX, Godot is like OpenGL.

Most content creation software that I've used are right-handed with Z-up, maybe dating back to CAD packages treating floor plans (or other 2D drawings) as XY? Maya is an exception here with a Y-up, and I think SolidWorks might be in that camp as well.

https://twitter.com/DJ_Link/status/952185276218200065/photo/...

POV-Ray uses a left-handed system with Y-up. I think this is pretty unusual but I always found it strangely intuitive.

ZBrush is Y-up, Z is front-back. It's freaking annoying.

Every game or graphics library i've used had y-down coordinates. It always confused the hell out of me and I'll still make mistakes sometimes. It's the opposite of the machines I spent every day programming. They're all y-up.

Yes. I think in Unity's case this is a consequence of their 3D and 2D originally (or maybe still?) being the same thing, so they preserved the X and Y axis between them.

2D coordinate systems almost always have top left as (0,0).

Screenspace was always x-right, y-down (aka Cartesian quadrant IV) because that was the convention NTSC used to paint the screen.

3D has not had the benefit of an obvious hardware model to emulate. Y-up, Z-up, Y-down are probably the three most common variants though.

Who else in 3D uses Y-down? I’ve seen Y-up / Z-into-screen (a la Direct3D), Y-up / Z-out-of-screen (a la OpenGL convention), and Y-into-screen / Z-up (top down type games like RPGs, RTS etc.)

I haven't seen Y-down (in 3D space) since software rendering days.

I've yet to meet the monster who would use X-left. :P

I can't think of anything else with Y-down in 3D, but I can sort of see the logic in saying "the vertical axis in screen space and world space might as well be the same."

It's all arbitrary anyway, so why not let one thing be consistent instead of saying "Y is down on the screen, but in the world Y is sideways and Z is up."

(I do still think it's weird, but I'm sure I'd get used to it)

I've always found this convention bizarre, because graphs are always drawn with the origin being the bottom left.

I'm not sure where the convention comes from. Maybe CRT screens drawing that way?

Ogre 3D and VTK have a "normal", Y-up coordinate system.

> - You cannot inspect the scene in the editor visually while debugging. This is what I miss the most coming from unity. Some things are really hard to debug this way, for example if you use procedural generation.

Does this include looking at the [Server] tab in the editor once the game is running? That shows dynamically created nodes at run-time.

Wow, there's a "Remote" button in the scene window which does exactly that. Is this, what you mean?

Thanks! Learned something new!

Yep, that's it! The first thing I made was a roguelike with Godot and I had the same issue w.r.t procedural content and "static" content being disparate.

Someone on reddit showed me this same tip.

You can even change values on the remote tab and have them reflected live in your game, which is fun for prototyping.

I also totally missed this last time i looked at Godot - so off to to play again - thanks for highlighting this.

There's good context/discussion in the PR that implements the game camera override/"hot camera" in 3.2: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/27742

Thanks for this! Didn't realize this was possible.

I second the missing vim shortcuts. At some point I'll probably figure out where the editor source is, mess with it until I have 'i', 'esc', 'd', and 'w' working, then submit an issue on github. I think that sort of pattern is why you see so many open issues - there's just an absolute firehose (dare I say a generation of junior devs) of people looking at this project.

If you search for "vim", you'll find there's already an issue: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/17213 - the latest comment is about a year old and says:

> The current implementation of the text field looked pretty much straight forward and exchangeable. So at anyone reading this, feel encouraged to grab this issue! :-)

FWIW, there is a GDScript syntax highlighter and completion plugin for vim [0], and there was also a GSOC project to add language server support for GDScript [1]. I don't know the exact status of the PRs besides that some parts of it haven't been merged yet, but some did apparently make it into Godot 3.2. I'm sure testing and bugfixes would be appreciated.

[0] https://github.com/calviken/vim-gdscript3

[1] https://godotengine.org/article/gsoc-2019-progress-report-1-...

Language server support is in Godot 3.2, there are extensions for VSCode[0] and Atom[1] currently.

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=geequlim...

[1] https://atom.io/packages/lang-gdscript

Being in a similar boat, I agree with all of your points. I do think 3.2 includes at least a partial fix for:

> You cannot inspect the scene in the editor visually while debugging.

This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuTKFha8QBs) shows how you can override the running game with what is in the scene view.

Aren't top to bottom coordinates actually common in computer graphics?

The reasons seem historic: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/83570/why-is-the...

Yeah, the screen space in memory started top left and ran to the right horizontally and then down vertically.

IIRC Godot also lets you change the font size, where in Unity it is fixed and awful. I have two 27 inch monitors. Unity looks great on my 4k one, but the UI is basically illegible on my 1440p one because of their janky font handling.

I thought Y up in 3D was strange, coming from Blender/UE4 where Z is up. I was told Y up is coming from OpenGL.

Agreed about 2D being from top left. Makes sense in theory, feels unnatural in practice.

> 2D coords starting at the top left corner of the screen and increasing right/down is really confusing. If the player jumps, y goes down. It's a bit strange.

Where do the coords start in Unity? Just curious

In Unity up is +y, down is -y.

In Godot it's reversed, I guess because screen updates usually start at the top left corner of the screen.

It's reversed in most places historically. 0,0 is top-left. I think unity is the odd one here

In my teens I used Multimedia Fusion extensively, the sequel of The Games Factory (also called Corel Click & Create?), the sequel of Klik&Play, made by the creators of AMOS and STOS. The three (four?) first uses the same 2D coords orientation, and I suspect also the last two.

Edit: I believe also Scirra Construct uses the same.

concerning the +5000 open issues on github, when are you going to pick a few and see what you can do to fix them?

Why should he/she? If I support Godot financially, I'm not going to pick up issues. Yet, I should be allowed to raise concerns, shouldn't I?

You are allowed to raise concerns at any time even without financial support. However, it is considered poor form to waste the time of someone who is working without payment.

I'm so happy, that Godot is open source and it's one of the main reasons for me to switch from Unity. Closed source is such a mess, if there are bugs, which never get fixed or features, which are half baked. And there are quite a few in Unity.

They mentioned in the article, that they closed 2000 issues for 3.2 and that's quite an achievement. I simpy hope, that the main maintainers can handle the load. Triage new issues and managing open ones is draining and not a fun task.

I mean to look into the list, maybe find some low hanging fruit, but it costs so much time if you ain't familiar with the engine. Time which could be used to write games... :)

You don't get to ask that question unless you've fixed a few of them yourself.