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Comment by apitman | Hacker News Reader

Been using Godot the past couple months. It's simply a joy to work with. From the single (relatively) lightweight executable model, to the dogfooding of implementing the UI with the engine itself, to the design of GDScript, etc etc. They definitely implement a lot in-house, but reuse existing software where it makes sense.

Every once in a while I use a program where I just feel the authors think about software similarly to the way I do. Godot is one of those.

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Does it share widgets with blender or is this another graphics app reinventing the wheel?

How does sharing or not sharing widgets with blender make this “another graphics app reinventing the wheel”? Godot is a game engine, not [just] a graphics app.

But yes, Godot 4 directly translates interfaces with .blend files.

> dogfooding of implementing the UI with the engine itself

It's been pretty common in the past for every pro graphics app to build its own x-platform GUI widgets library. Was hoping this could come to an end, as it is a waste of time.

Blender is licensed under GPL, which makes it incompatible with most commercial game development.

Blender license does not impact the product created with it. It’s like a compiler. Or a pencil.

Wow that's pretty awesome. I think Unreal (and Unity) only support FBX files, good to know Godot has first-class Blender file support.

No, it's custom UI. Blender is GPL, not sure how you would like to use it's code in MIT game engine project.

GDScript sucks big time. It has not place in an engine, why would anyone ever invent a very inferior language to what already exists.

They should have used C#.

Well nobody forces you to use it. You can mix it with other languages, even more so in Godot 4 where languages can be GDExtensions. You can write one script in GDScript and another in C# if you want.

I personally like to use it. It's not perfect but it's a language that's tailored for the task it's doing, namely driving the high level logic of a game engine.

And most importantly it's beginner friendly, so it's pretty nice for people who want to get into programming.

Can you elaborate? I’ve mentioned this in another comment, but I think it’s well suited to the engine’s model.

> They should have used C#.

They did...

Personally as a beginner it's nice to have GDScript built-in. You can literally install Godot as a single executable and everything is self contained which vastly simplifies getting started versus Unreal where you have to install Visual Studio. (I have no experience with Unity but I'm assuming you similarly have to install some C# dependencies.)

Their motivations in creating GDScript are explained here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#what-w...

As a programming language it's pretty reasonable. The built-in editor has auto completion and documentation, you can resume from errors. The syntax is basically Python with optional type annotations. Comparing the Godot vs C# examples in the documentation makes me shudder at how much more verbose C# is in comparison.

As others have pointed out you can use C# if you want to. They provide a separate download for it.

I'm a heavy-duty C++ programmer professionally, but I find GDScript really nice to work with. It's very well natively supported in the Godot editor, and it inherits the syntactic simplicity of Python that makes it very easy to write small programs in it without having to think much about the details of the language.

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