I have no idea how substantial these improvements are, but a lot of positive energy on the other side of the fence…
That said, been great seeing all the consistent and positive changes regarding 6.0, hope the Unity guys are gearin’ up to compete! At this rate Godot could be a real contender soon…
You can see the actual list of changes as they currently stand at the link below. I’d estimate probably 80 to 90% of the changes are bug fixes which is very nice to see and I wish would happen for Unity, but there are some nice improvements in the list. I saw mention of .NET 8 which we’re still waiting for over here and entries related to source generators which are a complex thing to enable for us but trivial to use with Godot. Once again due to their newer scripting framework.
Yeah it’s not just the features, it’s the energy and momentum. It’s a huge contrast, Godot is pushing to new areas for the first time and have Unity and Unreal to use as a reference, and knee deep so they’re going to have intimate knowledge of these features as they seek to improve them in the near future.
Unity is coming in from the opposite direction, to have to work on this tired old engine that they don’t want to have to deal with having to upkeep all these old tools and pipelines. Could just be negativity, but we haven’t really seen anything exciting in years, aside from the animation revamp going on. If they’re able to capture that energy elsewhere things will be in a better place.
Godot also has the advantage of not having a huge set of asset store tools they have to worry about breaking, or existing AAA projects. There’s a lot more freedom to push forward and create cool stuff.
As an asset store tool publisher, I don’t feel that Unity takes sufficient consideration of store assets when deciding on breaking changes. They introduce such changes frequently.
Ah, maybe Godot will finally stop corrupting scenes after simple asset renames and/or after moving assets around. That said, the momentum seems rather tremendous even after you take into an account that a non-trivial amount of those items are things like updated online documentation, and a crap ton of bugfixes.
Note that none of those improvements are AI related or require additional paid subscriptions to access. They don’t deal with trends and buzzwords, all of those 3500 items relate to game development in a direct way. At the same time, they still can’t compete with Unity in platform support or even pricing for solo indies if consoles are considered. In a few years Unity might be in trouble though.
This also just happened:
Godot officially good enough for card games and high profile devs keep ditching Unity. And the hype I’m seeing around the engine feels like it’ll succeed no matter what, people have selected Godot as the Blender of game engines.
You know, if we take a step back from Unity, it’s actually a really exciting time to be a gamedev! Everything has fallen apart, but look what that did for Nintendo back in the early 80’s. It doesn’t mean the industry is destroyed and gone, it just means there’s room to grow.
Do any of you guys know if Godot does anything really innovative or really well? With Unity I would point to the incredible cross platform and prefabs and other ergonomic workflows. But is Godot actually truly good at anything right now? Or is it all forward thinking?
I don’t think it does anything Unity can’t. And Unity definitely is a lot more feature rich, albeit a lot of those features are abandoned and in maintenance mode or forever in progress.
What Godot offers primarily is no bloat - everyone are using the same tools so finding help and figuring things out is a lot easier. It runs on a toaster, even android phones so people in the developing world can use it unlike Unity. And iteration times are very quick with Hot Reload for GDScript and practically instant builds. Also, it’s FOSS, which for a regular user doesn’t really mean much, the C++ skills necessary to contribute are out of reach for most regular script monkeys making games, but this still leaves room for world class engineers to contribute when they are able to. And it’s actually happening now.
Damn, those quick build and compile times sound so nice. Waiting for that damn load bar is probably the source of 99% of the complaints on this forum. 
My biggest gripe with Unity is world building and not even close to performance by default.
How well does this work in godot? I’m so tired of manaully authoring bake tags etc to manage draw calls etc. Automaton is key, everything in Unty is manual when it comes to world building.
Are you talking about 3D terrain authoring and/or open world? If so, Godot by default doesn’t have terrain or level design tooling. I believe there are no plans for it either as they want to keep core lean and support various use cases via addons, perhaps official addons down the road.
In the meantime there are several popular terrain addons actively in development such as GitHub - TokisanGames/Terrain3D: A high performance, editable terrain system for Godot 4. It’s written in C++ so perf should be good.
For lighting you could bake or you could use their real time GI solution, which is just a checkbox for instant results similar to Lumen, but lower quality and easier to run on a wider range of devices. See Road to Vostok for an example.
Godot automatically generates LODs for meshes upon import and has native HLOD support as an alternative if you want to author your own LODs. Godot can also automatically bake occuluders for the whole scene, no need for manual setup.
@passivestar is a gold mine on Godot 3D world building but he’s running a non-trivial amount of custom tooling he’s written in GDScript to achieve live linking between Blender and Godot and other things:
The biggest downside is that the Godot 4 is still very new. The upcoming 4.3 release will be the first actually usable release imo. Expect a non-trivial amount of bugs as things get smoothed out in the coming year or two. Basic things will break that you take for granted in Unity. Despite the state of the tooling, core Unity is quite stable.
I ment world building in any capacity larger than protoype basicly. It feels like unity sometimes foreget there are people making actual games with their engine. 
Here is an example from our game, nothing crazy, but a pain to author to get it to run smooth in PC VR
Can’t really comment much on the topic, I dabble in 3D but I primarily do 2D development commercially so direct comparison from me is not that valuable and I know nothing about VR.
Godot is still in the early adopter phase so people are excited and enthusiastic. If Godot grows, it will face a lot of the same issues that Unity does such as bloat, compatibility, and reliability. Godot is not immune to bad decision making. For a long they wouldn’t support obj or the idea of a marketplace. Providing a character controller was a bad idea because everyone can just make their own in a day. Or the whole Godot supports all these languages, but the reality was most of those implementations where incomplete and not useable and without any documentation. The C# launch didn’t support Android and even now I think it’s experimental for Android and iOS. There’s still no web support in Godot 4. Godot is already struggling to do a lot of the things people take for granted with Unity and this will continue to become more challenging for them.
It’s important to remember Unity is the most popular game engine by far, and has been for years. Trying to keep all those users happy is an impossible task and this will result in a lot of people expressing their dissatisfaction.
I do enjoy using simple game engines and if that works for you, great, but unless I’m making a simple games they’re not an option that makes sense for me. I do wish Unity had better usability and prioritized things differently. It does look like they are moving in a better direction. I really like what I’ve seen with Unity 6.
Indeed, and they’re already showing some of it. For example field values in the editor don’t automatically clamp to valid values for their respective data types. An unsigned byte has a valid range of 0 to 255 but Godot allows you to assign values less than 0 and greater than 255. In my opinion the real competitor to Unity isn’t Godot but Defold since it covers the major platforms including web support and it does it without forcing developers to rely on third parties for the consoles. This is in spite of Godot claiming that this is somehow not possible to do with open source.
Here’s the relevant quote from the link below:
To be fair, Defold is not FOSS, it’s source available. And they are primarily funded by 3rd party corporate interests. Their console support is also massively lagging behind release cycles, like they got PS5 support this year, which is not a viable pace of adapting new platforms imo. And the engine doesn’t have proper 3D either, it’s one of the simpler available options.
Monogame, however, is FOSS and has console support but it’s also a framework, far easier to pull off when functionality is limited.
There is a free Godot Switch port available from RAWRLAB but it can’t do anything besides GDScript - no C#, no GDExtension, etc. And offers only basic functionality as well as no support. They themselves recommend working with porting companies for medium to large sized projects.
W4Games, meanwhile, support all features of Godot, provide support at a competitive pricing with Unity (read cheaper), and will be up to date with new platforms far quicker than engines like Defold. The claim that FOSS can’t do it is a bit suspect, but in context it seems to be at least partially true.
Common sentiment, here’s hoping.
I agree about Godot. I fear that they’re going to start running into issues soon, haven’t seen any sparks of genius out of that engine yet. Feels like everyone’s been chasing AI so hard what little dev is going on elsewhere has all their eggs in one basket. This is ultimately good for Unity and Unreal in the meantime.
It’s all hope and anticipation, easy to want that great engine, easy to say you’ll deliver. It’s another thing entirely to churn out those quality tools that elevate gamedev that are usable, ergonomic, and powerful. But to be fair those things take a bit to create, so only time will tell and they have other game engines to use as a benchmark.