Godot 4.3 Game Engine to Feature Native Wayland Support | Hacker News Reader

Godot 4.3 Game Engine to Feature Native Wayland Support

phoronix.com

96 pointsAdmiralAsshat30 comments

One of the great things about Godot is that the editor itself is a "game" running on top of the Godot game engine! This means that improvements to the Linux port will be noticeable in both published games and the editor itself.

As a consequence of running the editor, Godot also has great support for UI primitives, which I'm taking great advantage of in my own game!

I used Godot to make a tool that was not really a game at all, and I read about others doing that as well. It works great just as a simple WYSIWYG GUI editor and GDScript is not a bad scripting language.

Has Godot proper GUI-Components for building a good interface, or are those the type of freeform canvas-based interfaces?

Godot has very comprehensive GUI components. You're working with buttons, labels & windows, not at the rendering level (unless you want to!)

Here's an overview of what's available: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/ui/index.ht...

Godot has its own UI/layout system. They offer text labels, controls, anchor points, and other conventions for laying out UI. It's not simply coordinate-based like you might expect with a canvas.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/step_by_...

Viewing the latest UI docs (version 4.x) would probably be more helpful.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/ui/index.ht...

I linked the 3.1 page just because it had some graphics that showed the UI features in action. The 4.x pages lacked that. If you wanted to actually start learning these for development purposes though, then yes use the 4.x pages!

Cool beans :-)

Yes, if you need a quick cross-platform GUI prototype it is very nice. One major downside is, that it will use more resources than necessary when idling.

This project setting might help a bit with that, on desktop platforms:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/classes/class_project...

Interesting and hadn’t considered that. Wonder if there’d be any quick ways to implement some sort of toggle based on UI dev vs. game dev.

Isn't that the case for a lot of game engines? Thinking of unity and unreal

I developed an open source Risk clone in Godot:

https://github.com/argosopentech/Conquest

The biggest problem I've run into with Godot is that newer versions of the engine seem to frequently break my existing code.

Are you noticing breakage on minor and patch releases, or only major versions? Since you said frequently, it sounds like at least minor versions but possibly patch versions as well?

Frequently changing enough between versions that tutorials and community posts become out of date in a period of months.

We are about to start two small 2d games in my company. We can either go with Unity or Godot, client doesn’t mind. What should we choose?

I've found working in Godot a lot more intuitive than Unity (and definitely enjoyed the experience a lot more), but Godot still has a lot of rough edges, and version compatibility is very poor. If you go Unity you'll have access to a lot more canned assets and a much larger community, but, Godot is growing and maturing rapidly and is definitely a viable option.

If you need to ask, that means you should go Unity for the support and the community that are associated, if their cost is adapted

Are we supposed to pay the Pro license even though we are not a gaming company, but a software development company in general?

Sorry, I have no idea

Unity has much better documentation and tutorials abound for literally any topic. It also has all sorts of tools and assets that are easily available.

Godot is open source, and doesn't have the licensing fee controversy. You will not have to pay for Godot (unless you need to release to consoles). I also personally like writing GDscript.

If you’re making money on it and have no inclinations toward either, wouldn’t it make the most sense to go with the open source option? Not sure what your company is doing, but didn’t unity recently change their cost structure?

This has little to do with the post but someone knows a good tutorial/tutorials of Godot besides the documentation?

Why even bother? Wayland is on it's way out and will go down in history as the worst managed piece of system architecture in history. After year 16 (!) the responsible "committee" still has not figured out how to deal with window icons[1] or how to do drag and drop properly[2]. It's an absolute farce that needs to end soon.

1.: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

2.: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

What sort of nonsense is this? Wayland is the opposite of "on the way out". XOrg has been made the secondary option on a variety of distros for the last few years[1], and there are plans to fully depreciate it in the near-medium term[2].

It is far from a "farce" and your proof, if you read the discussions you provided are for corner cases and specific implementations that go against the explicit and specific designs of what the protocol should do.

You're purposefully misleading the discussion (which is fantastic - Godot being Wayland native is a huge success and benefit for the engine on Linux).

[1] https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/10/distros-which-adopted-way...

[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/rhel-10-plans-wayland-and-xor...

If window icons and drag and drop are corner cases "that go against the explicit and specific designs of what the protocol should do" the "specific designs of what the protocol should do" are clearly wrong.

Besides that, only RedHat and Collabora consultants are pushing for Wayland. People that actually use their computer (as in requiring e.g. drag and drop to work properly) stay on X11 and have done so for the last 16 years.

You're being a little disingenuous. Window Icons exist in Wayland, there's nothing stopping a compositor from adding an icon to their decorations. That proposal is about windows being able to set their own icon.

And drag and drop exists in Wayland. I can detach a tab from my browser and a new window appears and moves with the mouse. It seems that proposal was to replace an unstable protocol.

I look forward to your alternative, that also is compatible and optimal with the modern way graphics hardware works (Xorg isn't).

Xorg + DRI3 uses the exact same buffer swap mechanism as Wayland. Wayland is basically just a very over engineered protocol to blit some bitmaps. How exactly is Wayland more optimal for modern hardware?

If all you want to do is blit some bitmaps it's Xorg that's the overengineered protocol and you're better off using Wayland. You'll even get better security as a bonus...

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