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Comment by WillDaSilva | Hacker News Reader

The post title was a tad misleading - I got the impression that it was saying that Godot isn't ready and we shouldn't wait for it to become ready. I suppose it got my attention by being like that, and that was the point. Maybe it'd've been better as "Stop Waiting for Godot - Game Jam".

Happy to see Terry Cavanagh is trying Godot. I love Super Hexagon and VVVVVV, and am planning to play Dicey Dungeons in the future. Looking forward to see what he makes.

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The title refers to the play "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett. The phrase, "waiting for godot," has come to mean a situation where people are waiting for something to happen, but that particular thing will likely never happen.

So, in the title here, the phrase is used as a double entendre in a discussion about no longer putting off learning about an application that is also named Godot. That's my read, anyway.

Ah cool. And apparently that play it where Godot got its name from. TIL. Excerpt from Wikipedia:

> Linietsky stated in a presentation that the name "Godot" was chosen due to its relation to Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but never will.

Thank you for that. I didn't know that's where the app got its name - though, the play and the app are the only two things I am aware are named Godot!

I invite you to read it. It is short and quiet absurd. One my favorite plays.

I remember the actual play being excruciating, over three hours long, but I believe that written down it's rather short. It's often just waiting, with long pauses and empty stares.

Uh, it’s not. I suppose people can produce a given play however they wish but I don’t think three hours is typical…

Web searches suggest 2.5–3 hours is typical, both for stage productions and film adaptations.

A 2021 Broadway production was 3 hours long. A 2013 Broadway production was 2.5 hours (including intermission). I couldn't find any shorter examples.

Some of Beckett’s other plays are much shorter.

Ah? It should last around 2 hours, usually (like to what your 2.5 hours with interval comes down). I don't remember anyone complaining about the length when we went to see it in high-school; which speaks for itself, I guess, eh :-). The French performances (which are relevant since it was written in French) I can find last between 1h45 and 2h10. Perhaps in the US, like for TV programs, they inserted a total of 45 minutes of commercial breaks ;-)

Plays usually have a ~15m intermission.

All of that is correct for sure, but there is also the aspect of waiting for version 4.0 in the godot community. While Version 3.3 is really good already, 4.0 is supposed to be even better and the aspect of waiting for 4.0 to start a new project is a recurring theme in the godot community.

I've used Unreal and for some things, GameMaker Studio. Never have I used Godot. Would you recommend Godot over Unreal or GM2?

For 2D specifically, if you feel at home with GM and are already productive, stick with it. Otherwise, do try it out as it's incredibly good and the learning curve is not steep. For 3D, stick with Unreal.

Thank you.

That question cannot be answered in a meaningful way unless we know your skill profile and use case.

A qualified comparison is "Gamefromscratch: Choosing A Game Engine in 2021" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK6ulQaOpso>

If you need Unreal for your game, I wouldn’t recommend Godot. If you would use basically anything else, try Godot.

I can only recommend Godot. It's easy to pick up and feels like a consistent and fresh take on a game engine. For Unreal especially, for me, it felt like it would always come to the point where Unreal magic is needed to fix a certain problem. With Godot I've never had this feeling, the things you set out to do just work the way you expect them to. Overall you get the feeling that the engine distills the best gamedev ideas of the last 10 years into one nice package and I couldn't ask for more.

How do you find the tools? I feel like these kinds of systems live and die by what the tools offer you in terms of features, ergonomics, extensibility, etc.

What about the actual output? Are 3D games written in Godot comparable in performance to commercial products?

The remake of Sega's Sonic Colors was apparently created with Godot.

If you're looking for a good 3D engine that is open source there's https://o3de.org/ which is now part of the Linux Foundation and based off of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine

I tried to get into it a little, but it feels like you end up in the deep end quickly and it's hard for me to make sense of how you hook things up.

I get that there's some message passing thing going on but I don't really quite get how the objects all bind to each other or where you put your logic for controlling things.

A scene seems like an interesting primitive, it's just hard for me to make sense of how to organize things into it and the tutorial basically just says add all the things you want to see on the screen into your scene and don't worry too much about wiring things up.

But I sort of feel like I don't have a real model of how things interact in Godot to make sense of what they're doing yet.

Yup, unless the game absolutely needs to be running in the Unreal Engine, or absolutely needs to be made out of stuff from the Unity asset store :)

I think if there's any ambiguity about what might be best, and asking 'what engine' is actually a question at all, then Godot is probably the answer. If it's not really a question because you already know you require certain kinds of rendering or asset store dependency/workflow, then you've probably already settled on the engine that optimizes for those needs… but if it's more of a negotiation among competing needs, Godot rapidly becomes relevant.

Thank you. That is very helpful.

Godot was named after "Waiting for Godot" to start with! The word "Godot" doesn't mean anything else.

But readers like WillDaSilva may not have heard of the play but have heard of the game engine, and might instead assume that the title refers to "waiting for Godot [...to be mature/ready for developer attention]".

And then they might read the article

We've come full circle. WillDaSilva remarks about their confusion based on the title after having read the article.

I heard of a famous prosecutor also named Godot.

Thanks for the explanation. I’ve never heard of the play or the phrase, so I thought exactly the same thing as OP. Now the title makes more sense, though it does require insider knowledge.

I think the insider knowledge doesn't really help that much. In the play, he never shows up. So even with the knowledge of where the name comes from, a valid interpretation would be that people waiting for Godot to be ready are wasting their time and should go do something else.

Has anyone tried to port Godot to Solaris on SPARC?

Then you could listen to this tune while waiting for it to compile Godot and tell you what went wrong:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj5WvpkYHz0

This gives a new spin/explains the tagline on their website as well:

"The game engine you waited for."

My H.S. English teacher taught the class that the "Waiting for Godot" title could well be interpreted as "Waiting for God". And that includes exactly what you say: a situation where people are waiting for something to happen, but that particular thing will likely never happen.

Why did you have that interpretation instead of "You might not think Godot is ready, but it is, so you should stop waiting and start using it"?

Good question. Not sure. Maybe my mindset is too negative in general. Maybe I was prompted to take a negative stance towards it because of the use of the word "stop", as in "Stop Waiting for Godot" as opposed to "Start Using Godot".

I thought the same thing. Poor choice of words

It's an excellent title for a post but not everyone is familiar with Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot'. Terry is Irish and I certainly like the homage.

I'm familiar with the play on words but i still interpreted it like that because the whole point is that godot never comes (will never be ready for prime time in this analogy).

A more fun play on words in my mind would be 'the wait for godot is over' or 'godot has finally arrived' but i understand how that wouldnt be as true to the spirit of the play

I don't think the analogy breaks down at the "never comes" part. I think that's fine. I know I have a list of future projects I want to get to, many of which I never will. Someone might have a similar list with "Learn Godot" on it. The title of the post is basically saying "Do it now, don't wait forever".

The analogy breaks down at where the control lies. In the play, the characters waiting have no control over when Godot arrives. So they're waiting on an external entity. With this article, the waiting is procrastination and the arrival is fully in control of the person doing the waiting.

I feel like he came up with a very clever post title first and then had to write a post to go with it.

> It's an excellent title for a post

But perhaps not this post.

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