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Comment by shdon | Hacker News Reader

Having looked at the migration guide from 3.x to 4.x, I am rather worried at the large amount of stuff that needs to be changed to port projects from 3.x to 4.x. There's an automated conversion tool for parts of it, but there's so much that it doesn't handle.

My enthusiasm waned quite quickly when I read that. The huge amount of breaking changes means that few projects or tutorials are likely to get updated and adoption of this new version is likely to be much slower as it's like having to build the ecosystem up from scratch.

As I'm about to start my first larger Godot project, I was initially waiting for 4 so I could work in that (and looking forward to it), now I'm going to have to seriously consider staying on 3.x if I want to get a good start.

Definitely not the case that you can just take a 3.x project, load it into 4.0, spend a few minutes fixing some bugs or deprecation warnings and then enjoy new features or performance enhancements.

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2.x to 3.x was like that too, I basically had to start over.

If you're starting a new project (like I am) I think 4.0 is the only choice. 3.x has awful 3D and even worse presets, GDScript can only be used realistically without the static typing features since they break all the time (for 4.0 they rewrote the whole thing just so they could fix static typing). C# really feels like something that was bolted on even years later.

It's not hard to see why 4.0 is such a breaking upgrade, many of 3.x problems aren't surface level, since those were ironed out long ago.

I really don't understand this mindset. Just start.

> My enthusiasm waned quite quickly

> As I'm about to start

You sure your not just looking for external reasons to justify procrastinating?

Wow, judgemental much? "Just start" is a recipe for disaster in a siatuation like this, and I'd rather not set myself up for failure.

My enthusiasm about this particular version, that I had been looking forward to, waned quickly. I'm about to start the new project after I finish up my previous one, and I'm currently waiting on getting the design document. I'm doing the opposite of procrastinating, I want the project to be done smoothly and in a reasonable timeframe. Having to contend with conflicting information where almost everything I look up will be for 3.x and not applicable to the 4.x series is the antithesis of smoothly.

So it seems now that my choices are to go with Godot 3.x and end up with maintenance trouble in the future and not being able to make use of 4's much improved feature set, go with Godot 4 and have a much rougher development experience, or go with another engine altogether.

I've been using Godot 4 exclusively since around Beta 8 and have had little to no trouble adapting. Godot 4 has had documentation for a while now, and finding the "new" version of whatever I needed was always pretty easy. That's only going to get better.

There is also of course the Godot 4 channel in the Godot Discord that is helpful.

That at least gives me hope that the ecosystem will adapt quickly. And I noticed GodotSteam for instance delivered a 4.0 compatible release today already: https://github.com/Gramps/GodotSteam/releases

> As I'm about to start my first larger Godot project, I was initially waiting

You were waiting for Godot?

Lol, in a sense. At least now he actually arrived.

Seriously though, mostly waiting on getting the design document and was hoping for Godot 4 to be the clear way forward. I've only done smaller projects with 3.x and lots of experimentation and preparation for these larger projects, so it is a bit disappointing to see that all rendered useless by the sheer amount of breaking changes unless I decide to stick with a now outdated engine.

Do you actually need to port? It's not like 3.x suddenly stopped working.

It's not like older games are porting to new versions of engines either.

For my older, smaller projects, nope.

For a few projects I'm involved in that are currently in development, I had anticipated porting because of the bugs in 3.x that we were having to work around which are now hopefully solved, though now I'm reconsidering that and it may be better to stick with 3.x just to get the game out of the door.

For new projects, it's a toss-up. Until a lot more resources (documentation, tutorials, plugins/extensions) make the shift to 4, it might be wiser to start even completely new projects in 3.x. But the improvements and fixes in 4 are enticing, so if the official Godot documentation is sufficient (admittedly, the official docs are quite well written, and usually it's more of a case of finding stuff than it not existing) and there's no need for extensions that don't exist for 4 yet, then doing with 4 might be a the more future-proof choice.

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