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Comment by ngold | Hacker News Reader

As a unity developer I'm drooling at godot. I can't wait to jump ship to open source. Don't get me wrong unity is great, but godot is super compelling.

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There's one thing that make me reluctant to use Godot though and it's GDScript.

Edit: Seems like it's not a problem anymore, can't wait to try again.

Doesn't Godot allow binding with multiple languages? You can even use Rust for that instead of GDScript.

The problem is few of those bindings are mature, nor can they be expected to remain up to date. I don't know of any games in Godot using anything but GDScript or C#.

This will probably change in the future (I hope it does, and I really wish Godot just used WASM internally so any language that already compiled to it would work) but as of now it seems there's no point to using anything but GDScript or C#.

You mean bindings aren't stable and require reworking all the time?

I mean that language support comes in the form of random third party projects like perbone/luascript[0], so stability and completeness are entirely up to the whims and capabilities of the owner.

It's open source, of course, so that's to be expected, but it also means support for any language other than C# and GDScript is kind of a crapshoot.

[0]https://github.com/perbone/luascript

C++ is very easy to use with Godot and integrate with the GDScript support. GDScript is also very good as a script language.

Been writing my own application mostly using C++ for the core logic and main application logic using GDScript. The interfacing between C++ and GDScript is suprisingly easy once you set it up.

But yeah stuff like Rust support is depending on the maintainers of that code to update to support latest versions of Godot.

There's C# and C++ support, with third-party bindings to other languages (Rust, Python, etc)

GDScript is very "python like", never feels like a hurdle.

I'm someone who isn't at all knowledgeable about game development nor its industry, so forgive my ignorance, but what are you waiting for specifically?

One thing many of the big players do that Godot doesn’t is require telling the user they used that engine. If you use Unity, you need to show the Unity splash screen unless you pay the big bucks; Godot requires none of that.

So why would someone wait for that feature before changing to Godot if that's already a feature?

For Unity, the "big bucks" is $35/seat/month -- that gets you the ability to make a build without a splash screen & without showing any Unity logos, etc.

For small shops (ie low or no revenue), you only need to pay that when you're ready to actually ship/make a build.

Note that the costs are higher if you're revenue is huge, it goes up to like >$100/seat/month or similar IIRC, I think that kicks in if you're in the 7-figures of annual revenue.

It's not free, and it can get expensive -- but you have to do the math on what you get, how much each will cost you monetarily & in time / opportunity cost, etc. IMO Unreal looks pretty compelling, and if they had C# support we'd jump to it in a heartbeat; I really don't want to write C++ on a day-to-day basis. If Godot keeps it up, then it may be the answer, in another 18 months or so -- but probably not wholly a commercially viable option quite yet, especially for mid-to-small shops.

Yes, why are you waiting for Godot?

Sorry, I’ll get my coat.

Not the OP, but I did jump into Godot full time for about three months last September. There were several significant land-minds that blew up in my face and it has made me lose some confidence in the core Godot team.

Without going into specifics, I think the problem is that the core team don't actually make games, they just work on an engine, so they don't appreciate the problems that I faced. (The same problem that Unity has, but at least they have the time to listen to devs)

I really want to love Godot. But I worry that the risks are too great to jump from Unity.

You're not wrong, gdscript is pretty awful. It's only python-like for someone who's never used python. No list comprehensions, no tuples (which means no destructuring in assignment or function parameters), no first class functions, etc. It's like Python 1.x circa 1999, only worse.

Tell me more.

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