This is a bit of a red flag if one of their goals is for the engine to be used on AAA games.
As much of a red flag as say Unreal? Who also dumped both Bullet and PhysX.
The solution where you can plug your own engine in is perfect. None of the physics engines are good enough for all games as all engines have discovered. Better to have something simple and in house for 80% of games who need only the basics and then let you bring your own engine.
Unreal by the way doesn't even let you do that anymore. PhysX support is being removed entirely in 5.
However, they say:
> That said, Godot 4.0 introduces the ability to bind custom physics engines at runtime (without recompiling Godot) via GDExtension, so it’s perfectly possible for the community to integrate other engines such as PhysX, Jolt, or Box2D if need to be.
I'm liking this work on GDExtension. It'll make Godot a lot more capable just on its own.
The only tried to integrate Bullet.
Ofc, that's just 1 aspect of the engine. There are numerous bugs in the IDE for 2d, which I have encountered. Also, the asynchronous event system quickly becomes cumbersome as a project grows. Ordering becomes important, for which there is no amount of control in Godot (dealing with mouse events, for example). This leaves every developer to implement a stateful dashboard, of sorts, to ensure events are handled in the correct order. This then leads to nondeterministic delays, etc.
Most commercial games have scripted character movement (every FPS, RPG, strategy games, basically almost every genre) and the only physics objects are random falling objects that don't affect gameplay... Cloth simulation, cool but can be faked and doesn't affect gameplay. Ragdolls, only really used when characters die and again, can be faked.
So name a single AAA game that actually uses proper physics for anything gameplay related?
Moving outside of your editor absolutely blows, and the less you do it, the better it is. Unless the alternatives are thousands of times better (nothing comes close to Substance Painter, and tools like Houdini still do some things better than internal tools for example. And of course, well, 3D modeling is still a hellscape of zbrush and Maya.), you just stay in with your tools. Nothing sucks more than having yet another editor and needing to have a pipeline to keep everything in sync.
It's not about needing crazy physics calculations directly in your engine (although your particle system being affected by it can do cool things), it's about not having to deal with yet another tool that fixes one problem and brings in 20 more.
Also, as said, the days of fully scripted movement are pretty much gone. There's physics interactions any time you have vehicles involved unless you want to feel it slide around and feel like crap, for example.
I agree it's not all that common but they are definitely out there. As for whether you could build those with Godot's engine I have no idea.