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Comment by strix_varius | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if a slightly broader search for existing solutions - for instance, https://defold.com - would have shown that quick-startup, 3d-capable, c-integrable, low-end-hardware performant game engines could have been grabbed off the shelf.

That said, this is cool and I would have probably celebrated a similarly fun project in their shoes. Perhaps the real accomplishment here is getting Toyota to employ you to build a new, niche game engine.

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This is specifically designed to embed into Flutter apps, which have specific requirements how they interact with the GPU and renderer.

They already tried other engines, such as Unity. The team didn't just go off and build something without trying existing solutions first.

Toyota complained about poor performance on all of Unity, UE and Godot, but also about long startup times with Godot.

I don't know how bloated Godot is, but AFAIK libgodot development started as part of Migeran's automotive AR HUD prototype so I'm surprised to hear it has poor startup time for a car.

Godot is pretty lightweight (especially considering how powerful it is), generally about a second or less. But maybe they are looking for a fast enough startup time that the engine can be started when showing something onscreen and torn down when not visible. In which case, I can see the startup time being an issue.

> long startup times with Godot

As a user of libGodot embedded into our existing c++ tech stack, I can say we do not have this issue.

The fact that they tried other engines seems to imply that non Flutter options were... Options.

If literally the only option was an embedded flutter view, then there was never more than one viable solution and looking into unity etc was wasted effort.

It’s possible to integrate other things into Flutter.

However, it’s not easy. I think their options were either a popular mainstream library or a custom solution, not investing into something more obscure and less popular.

Having used both, the experience of building actual UI with Flutter is a breeze compared to building UI in any game engine. I can imagine that most of the usage of Flutter is leveraging the huge amount of work that was already done to get efficient and capable UIs done with just a stack of widgets.

Godot Engine has pretty good UI building tools.

The places where it poses challenges in my experience are high quality typesetting/rich text, responsive UI that requires a wide range of presentations (i.e. different layout structures on mobile vs desktop), and granular control over rendering details.

But for functionality-oriented UI, it's hard to beat its simplicity and scalability, particularly when you want to develop on one platform (e.g. computer) and have everything "just work" identically on other form factors (web/tablet/etc.).

For example, Godot's editor is bootstrapped/built in Godot, and runs natively on Web, Android, and Quest XR among other platforms.

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