Hacker News Reader

Comment by Temporary_31337 | Hacker News Reader

How have people found the learning curve and debugging? My son did a game with it, but once we started trying custom stuff it wasn’t clear where the code for some things was - some things were in the scene some in the shapes etc. I.e. it’s crazy easy to start with but gets a lot harder as you go?

View on HN

For people with programming experience I found it to be reasonably fast to pick up. In some areas it's quite low level but "generally" has a good documentation.

Especially version 4.0 introduced some compatability breaking quality of life changes.

For beginners Godot is not as intuitive as other engines (e.g. Unreal with it's visual blueprints)

Well, they phased out visual scripting in 3.x because it was too low-level, but I do hope it will come back in a 4.x with a higher degree of abstraction because for folk with no coding expertise and for simple object scripts, Blueprints are just way easier (and so was Bolt on Unity, which my kids used with great success until I got them to shift to Godot 3.x and learn GDScript).

As someone who's worked in Unreal and Unity, I would have said that Godot is simpler than both. YMMV

That aspect of not being sure how your assets should line up is a general "game engines are complicated" problem, which occurs as soon as you add this kind of flexibility: suddenly there's just a lot more dependency behavior to be aware of as you set up your data and a lot of code bugs become data bugs.

Godot is relatively consistent in what it wants and how it parses a scenegraph, but it's still a little bit quirky: it usually behaves best if you break out any dynamic elements into different scenes so that their instancing is fully encapsulated, and for things that need to change state, add on/off toggles but keep it statically instanced. Attaching stuff after the scene has been instanced tends to bring it out of sync with the state of the collision/physics servers.

I have the same experience, it's very easy to get started but gets more complicated and especially buggy the more of the not-widely-used features you begin to use or the larger the project becomes, unfortunately. But many of those issues are constantly being addressed and iterated on, so i'm quite positive about godot's future.

That’s mostly on the way you plan structure your code. But also inherent in programming. Make sure you comment your code and keep certain planning central or near to your files.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com