The Mirror (Godot bashed game engine) | Hacker News Reader

The Mirror (Godot bashed game engine)

github.com

92 pointsborn-jre18 comments

I dunno what's going on with "bashed game engine" but had they honored the site guidelines and used the repo's description it would have been a lot more interesting

> The open-source Roblox & UEFN alternative giving you freedom to own what you create. An all-in-one, real-time, collaborative game development platform built on Godot.

Seems to be MIT and "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License" for the game assets

> Godot bashed game engine

It's a typo - 'Godot based game engine' is what it should read I think.

HN has a length limit for submission titles (80 chars I think), so that wouldn't fit.

Played with this a bunch last weekend with some friends. It's fucking awesome. Documentation is lacking and it isn't at the point of Gmod usability, but I see huge potential.

Right now you can do visual scripting and live code editing is coming in the next update. The developers on Discord are super approachable and helpful.

Several game developer friends of mine who use Godot are excited to start working with this so they can show off their work and get my feedback in real time.

If you do that again, please consider streaming it and then letting the developers have a copy of the stream to post somewhere.

I'm not sure anything else will do the "this was fun to play with with friends" part justice.

I wonder how they plan to monetize given they already have a handful investors.

potentially the same way fortnite/roblox gets monetized? They want users to start coding new games using this platform, and they could provide a service for which those games could be sold/played and collect a small fee (either via microtransactions or something similar).

"Hosted cloud-ish deployment for people who don't want to be their own sysadmin" would, one would hope, be of interest to a bunch of the target market.

Whether that's a viable business or not, search me, bub.

They take a 10% cut in the marketplace they run for developers who opt in.

Game engines are a terrible business, so I don't know. I'm surprised investors were interested, TBH, as interesting a project as it is.

The fundamental problem with game engines is that the bulk of the users are tiny to small indies, who will complain endlessly about any fee whatsoever and even if it's the best tool ever would never pay more than a couple hundred per year. You'll be lucky to get even a few hundred to pay that. On the other end, BigCo game companies, if they'd ever by some miracle greenlight the use of your product rather than using their own shitty internal engines or Unity/UE, are so few in number that even if you can sign one or two you've got a tiny total addressable market.

Probably a fine business, if it works, for a solo bootstrapped engineer, but beyond that it gets very difficult. I'd love to be proven wrong because it'd be fantastic to see more competition in the space (Unity and Unreal both frankly suck balls, largely because they each essentially monopolize their niches and have no incentive to compete).

Maybe using Figma as an analogy, right after the first paragraph stating a mission of software freedom and ownership, is not advisable.

I got the impression that they were using Figma as example of "highly collaborative software that's easy to use".

Then Penpot instead, maybe.

This really needs some screenshots and/or video of what it is.

I mean, reasonable people can differ about whether a link from their readme is what you're after, but they have a YT video on their website, their own YT channel <https://www.youtube.com/@themirrorgdp>, and a bunch of screenshots. That "fade in on scroll" horseshit can't die fast enough IMHO but pressing pagedown about 15 times will pull in all the content, and then one can go back to the top to actually see what's going on

I like the explicit mention of analytics collection api. But more important what is its place in the Godot ecosystem I wonder.

Cool concept, I hope they succeed. Anyone know what level of maturity this project is at?

I checked LICENSE.txt [1]. The code is under the MIT license. The assets are under CC BY 4.0 license. There are two parts (italics added by me) that I would like clarified:

> Game assets, including but not limited to 3D models, sounds, artwork, and images, are licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license with attribution, unless another license takes precedence. This does not apply to code, which is licensed via the above MIT license.

...

Is any file within the featured Github repository (not including files from the upstream godotengine/godot repo, which is under the MIT license) under a license other than the MIT license or the CC BY 4.0 license?

[1] https://github.com/the-mirror-gdp/the-mirror/blob/dev/LICENS...

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