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Comment by mdtrooper | Hacker News Reader

Well, I write one thing: https://godotengine.org/

The thing that I like the most about Godot is that the binary weighs less than 200 MiB, compared to the several GiBs of Unity, and that you don't need to deal with any account, registration or license BS like you do in Unity.

However, one thing I don't like about Godot is their choice of a dynamically-typed, scripting language as their main programming language, instead of a statically-typed, compiled language which, in my humble opinion, would have been better.

I think it’s possible to interface with other (any?) language.

> However, one thing I don't like about Godot is their choice of a dynamically-typed, scripting language as their main programming language, instead of a statically-typed, compiled language which, in my humble opinion, would have been better.

I have never used Godot, but from https://godotengine.org/features/#script :

> New in 4.0: GDScript offers optional static typing support, boosting your coding efficiency and runtime performance.

and

> Godot is built to be extended, and that means you can choose a programming language not provided by the Godot team itself. Thanks to our community there are many language bindings for popular tools like Rust, Nim, Python, and JavaScript.

> New in 4.0: C++ supports comes officially in the form of GDExtension API, which gives you a way to script and program your game components for maximum performance without having to recompile the engine.

GDScript can be made to use static typing: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g...

Additionally, C# has first class support and community supported languages include stuff like Nim, Rust, and Typescript: https://github.com/Vivraan/godot-lang-support

Compilation is irrelevant to a game engine scripting language. I think Godot does some magic on their end to make the interpreted nature of GDScript not matter from a performance perspective, but don't quote me on that.

Compilation is quite relevant when targeting mobile and game consoles.

Gdscript is an interpreted language but it is compiled to bytecode when exported which results in large performance increases. You can also improve performance by using static typing. Please continue with the smart ass responses about a tool you clearly don't understand though.

So what is the intelligent response for GDscript targeting platforms where only native AOT is allowed?

Exactly. This debacle shows why truly open and free software is important.

You beat me to it. I don’t understand the licensing changes unless Roccitiello isn’t aware of both the existence of Godot AND its new C# support.

There will always be someone to say that an open source project can’t replace a mature, proprietary one since it doesn’t match all the features or ecosystem. Historically, this changes really fast once you make the licensing terms bad enough to make a large chunk of your customers and prospective customers leave and take a good risk with said open source project.

Roccitiello was also shortsighted when he was CEO of EA. It’s sad that history repeats itself.

IMO this move doesn't really hurt the hobbyists (200K installs + $200K over last 12 months). And Godot as an OSS still has to feed the hands that make it eventually.

You’re right, but the more hobbyists read these complaints, the more likely they’ll just use Godot as future insurance against Unity’s future quick cash grab schemes. Unity must be really hurting for additional revenue, and given that we’re at the end of cheap leverage, I predict that it will get worse for the people who stay with Unity

I've just started a project with big scope (for me) and after futzing around with lots of different frameworks/engines/languages, I restarted the project again (part of my process with some of my projects) using Godot 4. After some initial confusion, which is largely the fact that I have more of a "terminal" kind of coding experience, or just building everything from scratch and thereby escaping learning a bunch of APIs, I started to realize the "why" of things like nodes and signals.

Now I'm learning a lot and decided to stick with Godot for this project. My restarting phase is over and I'm moving forward now! I've been really enjoying it! The more I use it I really like it.

A funny experience today, in part due to google being "not terrible" these days (as we say in French), was looking up internationalization. The first hit was a youtube video that was in Indonesian with no subtitles. But in two minutes the guy showed the file structure and whatnot and it's super easy to use.

Sometimes (always-ish?) the docs don't provide examples, which I think would be helpful, and sometimes error messages could be different like, instead of "wrong args on function" it could tell you what the right ones are (like Rust), and I don't know how to refactor other than manually which is different when you're used to IntelliJ, but these are minor gripes.

Overall this experience reminds me of what got me into coding with Flash when I was a whippersnapper, when I felt it was really fun. It feels like you can make whatever you can dream of happen.

Then I read about Unity here today and how sell-outy they are acting it reminds me of another reason to continue using open source, or free software like Godot, or Reaper (free-ish) or Blender. We are starting to have really high quality options these days.

I really hope Godot forges foreward and I hope the ethics continue to serve independent devs. And I really hope there's less breaking changes than 3 -> 4, because it makes it kind of tricky to find references online when a lot of syntax changes. But hey I love python and I got into it in early v.3 days when most stuff was v.2 so I just started with the then bleedy version and that's what I'm doing with gdscript also using v.4 and so I guess I may just have good version timing when I start a language, that is if gdscript can become a little bit more backwards compatible at some point. But also, do what must be done. Sometimes things do need to change so I get that, but at a certain point in time there "should" be a baseline compatibility with self (IMHO) in software. Or to me, that is part of what makes software good.

Also if I'm talking to one with such power, can we pretty please have list comprehensions? And also if the gods desire, can we have the format string from python?

  comprehended_list = [v for v in a_list if condition]
  comprehended_dict = {k:v for k,v in a_dict.items()}
  formatted_str = f"typing stuff and then {any_typed_var}"
  # This basically calls the var's __str__() and then __repr__() as backup

Anyway this post is not meant to sound complainy, or begging (for slightly more pythonicism) but more so as funny although I'm not. Badum-Ching, I'll see myself out. Seriously though I think Godot is awesome. Please keep up the good work. Although I don't understand the "why" of being like python and then not. Like why rename .lower() to .to_lower()?

People believing that in the mobile space Godot can be a replacement to Unity are delusional, in 10 years maybe?

Godot is a "mature" toy engine. There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot.

> Godot is a "mature" toy engine.

This does not seem to be related to this:

> There is not a single quality / money maker game that shipped on Godot.

There's some missing context in the middle. I'm curious how one implies the other? I'd be game for chains of logic going from first -> second or vice versa.

I'm specifically curious, what is Godot missing?

Godot is missing the game that shows this engine is a viable alternative to Unity at large.

I mean look at the showcase:

https://godotengine.org/showcase/

It all looks amateur.

All the mobile dev work on Unity so you better have good reasons to change the entire pipeline.

so nobody wants to make a fancy looking game because nobody's made a fancy looking game... hmm...

You don't want to be the first one to make the jump.

Having wandered around a ton of game engines over the years, they all have the "showcase games, none of which really feel polished." I dunno... Godot's showcase has a lot that look quite polished.

I think from a business perspective, I'd be more at ease if they could advertise any profitable games.

Not that games need to be profitable, but there's some value in knowing other people tried and succeeded to use Godot commercially.

Someone should be the first!

Maybe having a game engine that is universal for mobile, console, and PC is the problem. I'm not interested in playing mobile or console games or the type of gameplay they encourage. I'd like a PC game engine for PC games.

Cassette Beasts and Cruelty Squad were both critically acclaimed, with Cassette Beasts also shipping on Xbox and Switch.

This seems like a negatively charged take. Vampire Survivors could have been made in a ton of different engines that are far far less capable that Godot, for example. The engine is not the thing that holds back a product from succeeding.

This is the same as saying "no FAANG company uses X language/platform so X is a toy", it's far too reductive and not actual reality.

As someone who’s played a lot of games… I disagree. These days I specifically avoid Unity games because they always feel janky, and yes it absolutely is the engine.

> yes it absolutely is the engine.

As someone who has used Unity a lot, it really isn't the engine. You're only noticing this is the whole "no good toupees" thing. The thing is, the Unity Assetstore makes it very easy to hack together something that kind of works, but because nothing will quite fit together it'll be a janky mess.

Do you think Rust and Escape From Tarkov are janky? (just off the top of my head)

https://rust.facepunch.com

https://www.escapefromtarkov.com

Yes to both, Tarkov in particular. Didn't that game have totally broken directional audio for over a year at one point?

Tarkov, while a great game, is very janky, and has a cheater problem. I have heard these things attributed to Unity, though I am not familiar enough with the details to say that's absolutely true.

Rust is fine though, in my experience. (and yes I do mean the video game in this context, hahaha)

Tarkov is a bad example. The devs are absolutely FLOGGING the entity count and their maps are huge with lots of little details. People give them crap for doing a bad job but the vision they have for the game would be difficult to pull off no matter the engine. They have been on an old version of Unity for a while and are currently moving to a newer version.

One big argument people have is whether the lighting in game is good or not. They do dynamic lighting, which can definitely cause some voidlike shadows, but people were arguing over whether Unity had tools to help with that or not.

Also, multiplayer is hard, but they have made some (very questionable) decisions like sending all clients the entire map entity list. Hackers abuse this to know where rare items are located and even the stuff other players have found or brought into raid. If I find a GPU or LEDX and put it in my bag, they instantly know and can come kill you to take it. This combined with issues with desync, audio not working correctly, invisible players...I don't think this is a Unity problem as much as it's just a complex game, a pretty small dev team, and they don't want to hire outside of Russia.

I don’t take it to that extreme, there’s great Unity content (walkabout VR mini golf comes to mind), but recently when I really played an Unreal Engine game again for hours (Satisfactory), I was floored by just how much better optimized it was. A similar, arguably simpler, game in the genre (Oxygen Not Included) is Unity and famously terrible on performance. I had just sort of accepted that was how it had to be. It’s not.

Oxygen Not Included is a _significantly_ more complex simulation than Satisfactory is as ONI is doing gas movement & thermal transfer mechanics across a large 2D grid.

Now compare Satisfactory to its actual genre-appropriate competitor, Factorio, and suddenly Unreal looks like a pathic joke. Factorio scales _so_ much better it's absurd, but that's really down to the quality & focus of the simulations being added by the game developer. None of it has anything to do with the engine itself (well, except that Satisfactory is limited by the number of game objects it can place as a result of an Unreal Engine limitation...)

Haven’t played that one much. Thanks for the added color.

Now imagine Factorio in Unity. Do you expect that to be better or worse than factorio on unreal?

I'd expect it to be equivalent since the task the engines are doing is well within both of their respective capabilities.

The engine is not simulating any of the factory logistics, that's all going to be bespoke code by the game dev and so there's no major reason to expect unity or unreal to behave meaningfully different here.

Sure there is: C# is substantially less performant than C++ code.

C# has a pretty good FFI system that can call into C++ code. Unity itself does that, after all, it's not entirely written in C#

Factorio is insanely well optimized. Any overhead is going to be noticeable.

Having played a lot of games isn't really much of a qualification, is it? I'm curious about your claim that Unity games "always feel janky". Which games gave you this impression?

Basically every famous unity game? Like Cities Skyline has always been a complete disaster. So is Kerbal Space Program and in Dyson Sphere Program there are all kind of issues where once your map reaches a certain complexity the game just falls over, and save files bloat to hundreds of megabytes.

What are you referring to with Cities: Skylines? I've never had any issues with it, it's a pretty polished game. The real issues only start cropping up after installing tons of mods on top of it.

And yeah, I feel like you're choosing some specific games while ignoring all the others. Tons of famous Unity games are great. Is Subnautica janky? What about Hollow Knight? Rimworld, Beat Saber, Outer Wilds, Cuphead, both Ori games - the list of major Unity projects can go on for a while, and I wouldn't call any of the above examples janky.

> Is Subnautica janky?

Yes: I could make the crashed burning spaceship pop into and out of existence by walking a couple of metres back and forth across the floating platform I was standing on.

They've never actually gotten the agent simulation to work. Traffic doesn't even use all available lanes.

The Ori games have terrible performance for pre-rendered 2d graphics. That's the exact kind of jank I'm talking about. Tons of microstutters. It's like using a '90s Java GUI app.

Really? I can't say my experience matches that at all. Hell, the developers got both games running on outdated Switch hardware at 60fps, even in handheld mode.

And even then, as far as I know, they're not really simple 2D games, but more of 2.5D. There are 3D background layers and 3D-like lighting and effect calculations, in addition to overall being very visually dense and complex. I certainly can't compare it to fully flat games, like the aforementioned Hollow Knight or Cuphead, etc.

Haven't experienced a single issue playing BattleTech, which is Unity. Based on the sheer number of games built on Unity I'm sure you'll find plenty of games that are janky because they weren't made well. That's not the engine.

For comparison, Unreal games that don't get extra optimization and love during development have engine-standard issues. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is notoriously affected by Unreal load/unload lag spikes, even on console. Every Unreal game will do this to some extent unless that behavior is dealt with since it's just how Unreal handles large texture swaps.

So yes, an engine can have known issues, but isn't it up to the devs to make a product that runs well? Unfortunately for Jedi: Fallen Order they just weren't given time to make it work well, just "good enough" for console, and it's even worse on PC. The sequel has the same issues.

Dave the diver is a successful game made in Godot : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1868140/DAVE_THE_DIVER/

Granted it's not a mobile game but still.

Thank you, I wanted to see quality examples like this. I'd love to find a list of high-quality polished games made in Godot, like this one.

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