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Comment by wizzledonker | Hacker News Reader

I regret the years I spent with Unity

Any non-trivial feature that Unity has where Godot lacks is usually re-implemented by bigger developers anyway. For Indie developers, these features are almost never necessary.

When developing tools, Godot is far superior. Any support guarantee that Unity provides is easily bested by the ability to inspect the Godot source code without signing an NDA. With the changes in Godot 4, developing add-on tools is easier than ever.

The Godot project is well managed, with pull requests being merged in a timely manner without a loss of overall project quality.

The mass exodus to Godot is perfectly timed. Godot 4 just released with many changes and improvements, addressing almost all the usual pain points between the two engines (especially in 3D).

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The one aspect that godot lacks currently is the store and marketplace ecosystem.

But perhaps the existing unity ecosystem sellers will look towards porting their stuff over, since their customers are in mass exodus mode.

Godot needs to prepare a good marketplace solution to accept the oncoming ecosystem developers, so that they can take advantage of this. Could even have a potential to use revenue from the marketplace to fund godot development!

I don't know where I read that bit, but the maintainers are very aware of the lack of marketplace and I think it was the first point for the "how can we accommodate the new devs" list. So it's likely to happen relatively soon.

I keep toying with the idea of using Godot to develop a local desktop application. Something like a poor man's Electron?

For what it’s worth, the Godot editor itself is made in Godot, and works great as a cross platform desktop application.

I never tried with Godot specifically, but i (and fellow varied developers) did it a lot in Unity and "it worked". The main points were :

- Relative ease of use for us (especially when working with juniors/intern who often only studied game engine and don't have framework experience)

- Performances ok/good (seriously it may depend the platform but a native game engine often have far better performance than a browser on input latency/rendering, wich is logical, it's the point AND they do a lot less than browser on other features)

- You can go really wild on design/feedback with low effort, especially if you have a mobile game ui on yours work folders

The pain points (some may be alleviated with dedicated libraries, I used none) were :

- On complex UI (multi tabbing/multiple modal screen ) the lack of native support you have in dedicated web framework was a pain

- You have to add yourself complex features natively offered on forms. Especially history, complex filtering.

- On complex I/O (network/files manipulation) the engine was (naturally) lacking.

- Unity and probably Godot assume by default they are the main windows on screen, you can encounter problems about that if you use it as a 320x200 windows between 4 other windows.(that said if you considered electron you won't be in unknown territory ^^)

I've done it a few times at my current job and it worked great for some simple UIs. Would probably work great for more complex stuff too but I haven't needed anything like that, I use it with C# as well.

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