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Comment by throwgaway29 | Hacker News Reader

> funded by venture capital (so has enough money to build products until it can actually make money)

What a dumb move.

> more contributors can be hired

Game development is in the dictionary definition of the mythical man month.

> But as importantly, it will provide the level of commercial support that bigger studios need to be able to switch to Godot.

Nobody is going to do that.

You know how Hacker News is really negative about stuff that turns out to be a huge success? There should be a name for the opposite, where a bunch of nerds get really excited about something that will definitely remain insignificant.

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You could have said the same thing about Blender (open-source 3D modeling/animation software) a few years ago, and you would look like an idiot today.

It's actually surprising to see the amount of negativity surrounding Godot on HN. The top comment in the thread about Godot's 3.5 release was someone talking about how Godot's feature set is "below average" compared to Unreal. I think you would be hard pressed to find any Godot user that thinks it is in the same class with a product developed by hundreds of engineers at a billion dollar company. Yet, because it has an enthusiastic user base (which is a good sign for a FOSS project), that somehow it has to compete with all solutions in its category. To your point, it would be like comparing Blender to 3DS Max or Maya in the mid 2000s.

Here is the original comment [0] and the relevant quote:

> Godot is below average in quality compared to Unreal

Quality != featureset; I've used Godot extensively (and dabbled with Unreal) and Godot just isn't as solid a product as Unreal, and it's not a small gap either. (I fully acknowledge that Godot necessarily cannot be expected to have the same development velocity and focus that a multibillion dollar company can, but nevertheless, that doesn't really factor in very much when it comes to choosing between the two.)

There are countless gotchas and footguns in Godot (some of which are being fixed for 4.0!) that directly impede my ability to use it day-to-day. Some examples that come to mind:

* No strict typing in GDScript (type annotations aren't robust enough and lots of type errors can sneak past) * No strict typing of node types (for example, Unity components can require the presence of component "X", and this relationship can be guaranteed since it's checked at build time.) * No strict typing of resources/scenes: they're referenced only by string paths, and it's not possible to check types at build time. * GDScript performance (this one's a killer; unless you resort to GDNative, scripting performance quickly becomes a serious bottleneck.) I've heard that performance is significantly improved in 4.0!

I've also encountered a number of arcane bugs (some fixable, some requiring arcane workarounds); notably, I recall a bug where there were multiple texture files with the same name (but in different directories); this worked perfectly on all platforms except for Android, where in one case only, the wrong texture was used.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32357248

Besides no strict typing, Godot also has a huge issue with string-based development. Everything is a string. I'm surprised calling GDScript functions isn't done with string literals like "function"()

Godot 4 greatly reduces this reliance on strings in the api, though. It has lambdas too.

Hacker News can be a pretty negative eco-chamber at times. The same post can either generate very positive or very negative comments, just months apart. Not a new phenomenon (remember the post by the Dropbox founder? "Why do I need this when I can rsync").

That said, if all the non-constructive negativity is filtered, there are often gems buried in the comment section, with genuine constructive criticism. As a neutral observer it's relatively easy to find them. If I was emotionally involved with a project, however, I'm not sure I'd read the threads.

> > But as importantly, it will provide the level of commercial support that bigger studios need to be able to switch to Godot.

> Nobody is going to do that.

> You know how Hacker News is really negative about stuff that turns out to be a huge success? There should be a name for the opposite, where a bunch of nerds get really excited about something that will definitely remain insignificant.

Let's call it trolling.

I work with B2B software(software library) and... professional support sells well, and companies are ready to pay a lot for it. Many customers won't even buy the software without support.

>Game development is in the dictionary definition of the mythical man month.

this isn't a too many cooks situation. There's definitely enough separate work to establish separate teams specializing in various aspects. graphics, editor, input AI, etc... There are dozens of features in an engine that can all be a full time job for a dedicated team of engineers.

also keep in mind the actual wording of Brooks law:

>adding manpower to a *late* software project makes it later

This is very much a long term thing, not some game in crunch launching next month

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