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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

I mean, even that interpretation seems like a wildly distorted view of reality. I've been watching the Godot community for years now and they're one of the most productive teams I've ever seen. Simply looking at the changelogs for minor versions and seeing how many bugs they fix and features they add should be proof enough of this. I mean, my god, for 4.0 they rewrote all of GDScript, and that was just a line item. The fact that someone's pet feature slipped through the cracks for longer than they would have like smacks of either a lack of understanding of the software development process, or entitlement.

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> Simply looking at the changelogs for minor versions and seeing how many bugs they fix and features they add should be proof enough of this. I mean, my god, for 4.0 they rewrote all of GDScript, and that was just a line item.

This doesn't disagree with OP at all. For instance, I remember the announcement for baked lightmaps. According to OP, despite the fanfare, the feature didn't actually work. I don't use Godot, so I can't really comment on the validity of OP's claims, but just reading the changelogs isn't sufficient to dismiss OP either.

The changelogs don't tell the full story. I've been trying to use the C# since Godot 3.0 when it was announced as the new hot feature and.. it wasn't ready, it was missing big essential integrations (like exported variables). Then 3.1 comes around promising "no for real, it works now" and it STILL wasn't ready. Sadly I've been noticing that this overpromising and underdelivering is the trend in the release notes.

I'll admit that it took time, but C# in 4.0 is amazing - I've used it and it's totally a first class citizen.

> overpromising and underdelivering

Man, this is an open source project done off donations. Doing an integration with an external language is so challenging that the Unity team - a group of fully salaried professional developers - actually abandoned their "JavaScript" and "Python" integrations.

They are still ironing it out. Not missing anything particularly of what you would expect from C# itself, but GDScript still has the edge in some things eg. master/puppet function annotation for multiplayer (unless that changed recently, but I could not find documentation about it).

You're free to demand things if you paid for it.

They overpromised on a free project, which you didn't pay for. It's a non-commercial project - I'd give a lot more leeway for that. Otherwise, go to Unity, and see how fast they fix the bugs in the things they promised to deliver.

Moreover it wasn't that they were lackadaisical; they overdelivered on other aspects of the Godot project. Sometimes some pet feature can wait, compared to improvements for other serious features that affect a wider profile (e.g. GDScript, C# integration, and the tons of other stuff in their 4.1 changelogs). Their resolution and closing of issues on the Godot repo is also really impressive and consistent for an open-source project.

> They overpromised on a free project, which you didn't pay for.

I think part of OP’s issue is that “they” (the main Godot developer) is starting a for-profit business that directly profits from the community’s goodwill. OP themselves is paying hundreds of dollars a month to run the forums not to mention the time investment. I can understand the frustration of seeing the community languish while the main focus turns to a for-profit enterprise.

The OP has only been in control of paying for the server for a few months. They only took over May 15th.

The original owner only paid a few hundred dollars per year for hosting the forums. Whatever the OP is doing that is making it cost hundreds of dollars per month is on them...

Furthermore, why did the OP take over control of the forums only a few months ago if they have been feeling this way about Godot since 2020?

I regularly send a few euros their way every month because I still wanna support the idea of having a nice FOSS engine, but whether I'm paying or not doesn't matter. If you want people taking your project seriously you need to build a credibility, and by always shipping half-baked features and calling them complete you do the opposite.

Instead what we get is the fact that I cannot trust release notes to be accurate while redux complains on twitter that the big companies are focusing on sponsoring O3DE instead.

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