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Comment by bentt | Hacker News Reader

I remember when Unity first appeared and what it felt like to read its materials, its pitch. It was like... whoa, this might actually be something.

This feels similar. Sometimes you can just tell by the communications and the spirit of the language that the team has the goods.

The fact that they have such comprehensive multiplatform export right now is big. One of Godot's biggest hurdles has been console support.

My ONLY beef, from what I saw, was that it was Lua only. If it was C# I would have been more excited. But at least it's not a full C++ recompile like SOME engines. :)

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Godot does support consoles, they just choose to move that to third parties. There's community Switch support if you're a registered Switch developer, and W4 Games licenses export plugins.

One of the reasons for this is because console plugins can't be developed in the open like the rest of the engine, because the console SDKs are behind NDAs. It's a pretty ridiculous holdover from when consoles were more specialized.

i wish people would stop mentioning W4 Games as a porting option. their lowest revenue tier costs $2000 a year. most indie games sell a few hundred copies.

You'd be hard pressed to find console support for much less than that - compare it with Unity or GameMaker's console support tier and you'll find it's pretty similar.

It can take hundreds of dev-hours to port your engine to consoles yourself, so having another company handle it for you, for all 3 consoles, for only $2000 is a pretty good deal!

Most indie games sell on Steam/Steam Deck first and port to consoles later, usually after being picked up by an indie publisher.

The $2000 is also to port to all three console platforms, it's $800 per. This makes it feasible to say, only target PlayStation with W4 and use the community Switch port.

That third party is owned by Godot's leadership and management. Your Godot contributions go towards their pockets.

Here's a list of other 3rd party porters: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co... Stop spreading FUD. It's FOSS. It's like saying contributing to systemd lines the pockets of Red Hat.

The situation with systemd cannot be compared to special circumstances of Godot and shady practices of its management. It's an essentially open core but privately owned product. I guess this is a better arrangement than Unity but it is not a true FOSS engine in the sense of the word.

How do you expect W4 games (or any other porter) to release FOSS exporters to proprietary consoles, when they rely on SDKs that are covered by an NDA?

Yeah I really like Godot and you're right, the third parties are working hard on that front. It's been a trial for them though.

I guess the roots with King have made things easier for Defold?

Exactly, read Lua and got out instantly.

Games are complicated beasts, something along the lines of C# help massively the development and the avoidance of bugs.

Python, <X>Script and Lua are not languages I'd wish to switch to from the coziness of C#. I'd consider Go or Java (although not as hip as it used to be).

If you just want static typing, you can write Typescript and compile to Lua: https://typescripttolua.github.io/

The Defold site recommends:

> Optional typed Lua using Teal.

https://defold.com/product/

https://defold.com/assets/teal/

https://github.com/teal-language/tl

Also https://ts-defold.dev/

They recently added C# support: https://forum.defold.com/t/defold-c-support/79479

C# support is still experimental and under development, but it is at least ready for testing for those that are curious. Note that it is C# with Native AOT so it's compilation and linking involved, not "scripting and hotreload".

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