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Comment by glanzwulf | Hacker News Reader

What kind of features are you missing from Godot vs other engines?

Okay I'll mention another thing after profiler that we were struggling with in Godot: making game UI. Situation should become slightly better with "Theme type variations" implemented in version 3.5. It's little too late for us as we dont want to jump versions before release just for this single feature.

Both Unity and Unreal have built-in tools as well as a lot of alternative middleware to build user interfaces. A lot of these tools are simply much more powerful compared to what Godot has to offer. And yeah this is not about features since even using current Godot system you can implement almost anything, but with Godot it's will take 2-3x more time.

Like there are bunch of issues with Godot UI and input handling:

* It is impossible (is it?) to set 3-5 different pairs of fonts plus colors for a few groups of controls. It's so much harder than using CSS in webdev.

* It not obvious what and why eat or blocked input. There is no visual debugger for that, only ugly text field hidden in depths of editor.

* MarginContainer use theme overrides and it breaks WYSIWYG. And there few more things I dont recall that have similar issues.

* And if you use Theme files it's required to reload the engine in order to apply changes.

Keep in mind it apply to 3.4 only since I haven't worked with 4.0 enough yet. Hopefully at least some of these are fixed in 4.x.

PS: Also there is a chance that Godot is not at fault and it's just us not being able to figure it out or that we missed something in docs. Yet this is the problems we struggled with the most while building UI for our game.

A recent one I looked for was a terrain system. There just... isn't one yet. It's totally possible they could add one some day, but I assume other things have just been higher-priority so far for their limited dev time (which isn't unreasonable)

I did find a third-party plugin that looks pretty high-quality, but it hasn't been ported to 4.0 yet

Bear in mind that almost nobody has really started porting anything to Godot 4, because it's still in alpha and stuff isn't quite nailed down yet. It makes sense to wait until the first beta, which is probably a few weeks off.

Sure, makes sense. But the question was which features are missing from the engine itself, and that one came to mind (Unreal and Unity both have built-in terrain systems, even though Unity's is crap). Not making demands, just observing/relaying

Another thing that's pretty interesting to have, but isn't quite there yet is dynamic render resolution scaling, which can be a godsend for lower spec devices.

That said, there's pretty much nothing preventing from people writing their own functionality to achieve this and someone actually did: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/1141

(note: for some, certain limitations might be dealbreakers, as described at the bottom of the description)

It's pretty cool to see people creating pieces of functionality like this, be it terrain functionality, or even the resolution scaling, which you can see a video of here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW0A-G5mMcw

I also recall there being a more static version that didn't seem to mess with your scene (as much?), but it wasn't really suitable for dynamic resolution changes at runtime back when I checked.

Now if Godot 3 could get a backport of dynamic LOD that would be great, but other than that Godot 4 is promising and it feels like the engine has a bright future ahead of it!

I just doubt that the asset/plugin situation will get anywhere close to as much of a flourishing ecosystem as Unity's, given that the financial incentives aren't quite there yet. Of course, having most of the current ones (even if a limited selection) be free is nice, though.

Personally our team is missing proper performance profiler. We have 2D title with 50+ KLOC codebase and a lot of objects, simulation and time warping. Profiling in Godot is really lacking compared to Unity / Unreal in both UI and features. We really just had to do "disable everything and turn it back 1 by 1" to find out bottlenecks.

Could you profile it with windows perfview[1]?

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/perfview

Sorry. I had to mention this I guess: we using GDScript. And even if we use C# lack of built-in profiler means that it's hard to find out what exactly is slowing things down as some of time is eaten by native code or "glue" used for callbacks and nodes creation.

It used to be missing occlusion culling, which is a big deal. I think it either has it now or else it’s in v4 though?

It was sparse on tutorial content from the community too, but that seems changed a lot too since then

I wonder what their heavily nested scene graphs do to performance but haven’t tested it

It's insane that a game engine until 2021 had no occlusion culling. Really tells you that the engine is not made with "big" 3d worlds in mind.

Here's Godot's current implementation of occlusion culling (sort of), though it needs some manual setup: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/performance...

If godot had official support for JavaScript, maybe via QuickJS - I'd probably actually get off my butt and build the game I've been noodling about for 20 years.

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