Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

> 4 years of development.

For some perspective, console generations are usually around 6-7 years. Given their stated AAA aspirations, I wonder what the future development process will actually look like, because another dark age like from Godot 3 to 4 would be a deal breaker. It's easy to say "future 4.x releases will come with a much faster cadence", but it's also easy to decide that something else absolutely needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in a multi-year effort.

But negativity aside, finally having a stable release is great. Godot is a really nice engine, and definitely a huge step up from the existing commercial engines in terms of usability.

View on HN

Unreal:

UE1: 1998 (some had access in 1996)

UE2: 2002 (announced 1998)

UE3: 2006 (announced 2004)

UE4: 2014 (announced to be in development in 2005, imminent in 2012)

UE5: 2022 (announced 2020)

The development cycles of Godot seems pretty comparable to the competition? The only difference is that by being an open source project, people can see the new engine is being worked on before a marketing department for a commercial engine would reveal it.

It's not about version numbers. I wasn't a UE3 licensee, but I'd imagine that came with decent support and the release of features to keep pace with the industry at the time. Godot obviously can't be expected to provide Epic Games-level support, but the main development efforts from the OSS team was split since they were (understandably) focused on Godot 4. So all of the improvements/changes in 4 were completely useless to most users during that time, who were realistically only going to be able to use 3.5.

There was no hint of a release date, a roadmap, or anything like that. It felt like Godot 4 was going to be stuck in development hell forever, meanwhile people trying to actually build a game would be stuck on the increasingly obsolete and divergent 3.5 (unless you were willing/able to maintain an incomplete engine during development). So that was essentially 4 years of nothing to most people (tbf 3.5 did continue to get bug fixes during that time).

I say this not to trash on the Godot team's work, but rather to say that I think they should focus less on improving the engine for the sake of it, and more on work that seeks to increase the direct value it provides to users (which includes potential customers of W4 Games).

> It felt like Godot 4 was going to be stuck in development hell forever, meanwhile people trying to actually build a game would be stuck on the increasingly obsolete and divergent 3.5 (unless you were willing/able to maintain an incomplete engine during development). So that was essentially 4 years of nothing to most people (tbf 3.5 did continue to get bug fixes during that time).

???

What are you talking about, the 3.x branch was being worked on and had new releases during most of that time.

3.5 itself only came out in August 2022, so between that and 4.0 was a massive...six months or so? Why is waiting six months a problem?

Keep in mind they were still updating 3.x that entire time. The 3.x line made it all the way up to 3.5 with significant improvements even as 4.0 was being worked on for those 4 years. Considering it is an open source project with very few people paid to work on it, keeping both going over that time is kind of impressive.

Some of those improvements came directly from the 4.0 work.

Also worth noting that many of those improvements were originally made only for 4.x, but some of the contributors backported them back to 3.x. It wasn't like 3.x only got minor updates while the majority of focus was on 4.x.

I really hope they can pull a Blender and become productive for small-to-medium games.

It's great to see some "commercially viable" games like Dome Keeper being built upon Godot.

It's definitely viable for 2D -- I'm 100% sure on this. The biggest factor holding people back is the hesitancy for a professional developer to leave something like Unity. That won't matter to the 1-2 person teams.

As I have no aspirations of working professionally in games, I'm using Godot. If I did have such, I would probably be in Unity or Unreal just for the opportunities. As of right now...today.

> another dark age like from Godot 3 to 4 would be a deal breaker.

Sorry, but there was no "dark age". The 3.x line was being continually updated during the work on 4.0. the last major 3.x release came out only six months or so ago, in August 2022 (3.5).

I don't follow Godot too close, but wasn't the big change also from 3.x to 4.x also migration from OpenGL to Vulkan? That's a rewrite of the rendering engine, which is a big part of a game engine, that most likely also affect a lot of other aspects of the engine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com