Thinking about moving to Godot

[mysticfall]

@zenGarden

Epic for example brings phenomenal features each update.
Until Godot gets developers teams working daily on it, UE4 or Unity always be years ahead

Godot is about 4 year old now but already starting to catch up on Unity in 2D department, which is a 12 year old commercial product. So, how can you be so certain that Godot won’t change that much in another 4 years?

@zenGarden

Godot 3 performance is not great, it lacks 3D tutorials, Unity has teams of devs working dayly on it , Unity has thousand tutorials about anything and it is the most popular with lot of mobile and desktop games.
…
The level of game quality a 3D artist can do in Unity is not comparable with Godot
…
If your game can wait 5 years to wait for tools and features, good for you.
Meanwhile i think you will still use Unity for very long time before Godot gets all you need lol

I already said Godot is currently far behind Unity in making 3D games myself, and I also said I don’t have any intention of making a commercial game any time soon.

I never insisted anyone should abandon their beloved Unity and start making some big 3D commercial games with Godot right now.

So, what gave you such an idea that everyone should use Unity to make some commercial games today, instead of doing whatever they want, with whatever tool they like, and in whatever schedule they see fit?

@zenGarden

Perhaps it’s open source, but money makes it possible, all progress or features will depend on how much money is invested in it. It’s all about money, without some money and patreon Godot would never had some devs putting more time in it.

A software project doesn’t get more features when its developers get paid, but it does when they - paid or not - actually write codes.

So, unless you believe pull requests from unpaid contributors somehow vanish when they get merged, you can only look at their commit log and issue tracker to see how fast they are improving Godot.

And tell me how fast you get your issues resolved by all those paid employees of Unity Technology when you report them.

I know they are doing their best and try to help their customers. But honestly speaking, my own experience wasn’t that great.

Probably they are just too busy to handle bug reports from that many customers, but compare that to my experience with unpaid volunteers of Godot, who have fixed all of major issues that I reported myself, or subscribed within a day or two so far, then you might get how sometimes open source contributors can do things better than corporate employees even without getting paid.

@zenGarden

I see no big plugins or big features announcements, nothing is in place like some Godot market similar to Blender market. Best plugin developers won’t be attracted until they can’t make some money
I think you’ll wait many years to get awesome plugins , if it ever happens.

Blender was nothing but a failed commercial product before it was turned into an open source project and become a huge success. So, what has convinced you that Godot will never be another Blender over the years?

If you somehow believe that open source projects, or Godot in particular won’t ever be as good as a commercial product, I don’t agree with you but I have zero intention to persuade you into abandoning Unity or using Godot.

So, I don’t quite see where you got that sarcasm with all those rolls eyes and 'lol’s in this kind of a discussion.

[zenGarden]

All my discussion is about Godot for 3D to make a high graphics game.

For 2D Godot is available and ready form long time, while most games are still made with Unity or Game Maker, why ?
Why Godot for 3D would get more appeal than it’s 2D ?

@mysticfall

So, what gave you such an idea that everyone should use Unity to make some commercial games today, instead of doing whatever they want. with whatever tool they like, and in whatever schedule they see fit?

No, competition is always good, new comers is good.
Godot will be an interesting alternative, specially for all devs doing small games that does not require advanced features until it would grow more on features eventually.
About it’s plugins or coming features this year, we will see, nothing is certain or announced.

@mysticfall

A software project doesn’t get more features when its developers get paid, but it does when they - paid or not - make actual commits.

Pateron helped a lot, without it i doubt you would see actual progress and actual dev team.

@mysticfall

Blender was nothing but a failed commercial product before it was turned into an open source project and become a huge success. So, what has convinced you that Godot will never be another Blender over the years?

Blender took many many years before gaining more notoriety. Why Godot would get faster popularity ?
Version 3 is just coming this month , no big plugins announced , no terrain and vegetation systems , sky or water systems , no new tools , no Godot market etc … lot of stuff remains to do.

@mysticfall

If you somehow believe that open source projects, or Godot in particular won’t ever be as good as a commercial product, I don’t agree with you but I have zero intention to persuade you into abandoning Unity or using Godot.

I don’t know, perhaps it will be as good as most popular 3D Engines and if best plugin developers start using it and more people use it to make games.
But it’s not the case, as it is as version 3, and like you said you’ll have to wait some years.

While my mobile or desktop games needs the features and tools right now lol

You forgot, CryEngine is getting lot of stuff redone to become more easy to use ( entities, new schematyc visual scritping, C# , new character tools , new easy Ai tools …), once it will be as easy to use as Unity, you’ll get another big challenger about totally free , no royalties 3D engines

So i don’t speculate as much as you, Godot can get popularity growing , perhaps 3D bigger commercial desktop games announcements this year, i didn’t say it’s not possible.
But if you start your game and you want the best features and tools, or simply complete terrain systems you won’ t use Godot 3.

About interest in Godot or the hype , right now i don’t see any big indie games announcements saying they want to start it with Godot 3 (unlike CryEngine , Unity or UE4).
Perhaps that will come, it will be great, but it’s again speculation only.

If you just want to play with it, and you have no game to release and no special features and tools needs, indeed have fun with Godot and keep the hype hight lol

[mysticfall]

@zenGarden

Pateron helped a lot, without it i doubt you would see actual progress.

Yes, donnations and fundings are always helpful, whether it is an open source project or not.

However, while you need sufficient budget to make a proprietary project successful, it is normally the other way around with open source projects. They usually get financial supports in forms of fundings and donations after they get popular.

So, money is not really a prerequisite of making an open source project successful, but usually a result of making it so.

@zenGarden

Blender took many many years before gaining more notoriety. Why Godot would get faster popularity ?
Version 3 is just coming this month , no big plugins announced , no terrain and vegetation systems , sky or water systems , no new tools , no Godot market etc … lot of stuff remains to do.

No reason, actually

I’d be happy if Godot would take as many years as what Blender took to become what it is now, and be as successful.

The point is, I don’t have such an unrealistic expectation of a 4 year old game engine to already have all the 3rd party extensions that Unity has built up in the past 12 years.

In fact, that’s part of the reason why I’m interested in moving to Godot, to help building that ecosystem myself if possible, because I find it worth while to contribute to such an open source effort.

@zenGarden

Godot can get a great popularity and get 3D commercial desktop games with it, i didn’t say it’s not possible. But if you start your game and you want best features, you won’ t use Godot 3.

And I didn’t say it’s a certainty either. Then again, I already said it’s not advisable to start building your next 3D commercial games with Godot right now for multiple times, so probably you don’t need to repeat it to remind me in every posts.

[zenGarden]

@mysticfall

In fact, that’s part of the reason why I’m interested in moving to Godot, to help building that ecosystem myself if possible, because I find it worth while to contribute to such an open source effort.

I doubt you will be able to create your own Gaia, Mega splat, RTP3, Archimatrux, ProBuilder etc … plugins while we have them already in Unity. But i understand your point to jump in and create your small tools to speed up level buidling for example.

But it’s promising and you can already make cool 3D stuff until you don’t need big terrain open worlds or tools like Mecanim, NodeCanvas for example.
Some issue is 3D games tutorials are really lacking if they want to really get more users on board.

[blurymind]

I used to be a Unity user, but then I switched to godot when the 2.* branch matured - even before they got support for c#.
It took me a week to learn gdscript and actually really liked it because of its similarities to pyhon.
It’s almost python, with some nice extra features.

What are my very specific reasons to prefer godot?

• Much smaller footprint - the entire godot engine and editor takes 1 second to load and is a single executable -about 30-50 mb. Runs flawlessly without need to install it or register. You can run it from a flash thumb and has no dependencies on other libraries- unless you need to build it from source. Unity is fat, bloated and slow in comparison. Getting it to run from a flash thumb without internet connection is not possible or a huge pain in the ass

• Godot is much more stable than unity on linux. It runs flawlessly on linux ,mac and windows. Believe it or not. Unity on linux is almost unusable. Crashes so often you can call it a gamedev toy. Moreover it is a complete pain in the neck to install due to it’s billion dependencies. To run godot editor , all I have to do is download a file and click on it - on all three OS-es
  Godot editor is so flexible, that someone made it run from a web browser
  Reddit - Dive into anything
  Just for fun. A guy, in his spare time.Sure its not very practical right now,but runs better than unity on linux lol

• Godot’s editor has included an actual code editor- with full api documentation both offline and online, autocompletion and all the good stuff you would expect from a code editor. It’s seamless and tightly integrated with the engine and editor. Unity uses monodevelop- which takes more time to load and more space to keep and is a separate application developed by a third party- Unity devs bundled. Godot lets you use other code editors of course- but the editor includes one itself. In that 30-50mb godot devs squeazed what unity devs couldnt squeaze in 5+ gb and couldn’t bother to make a part of Unity’s editor in 11+ years

• Its much easier to extend nodes in godot - as mentioned earlier in this thread- I too find it easier to manage and debug

• Considering its size, godot has a fleshed out 2d engine and a work in progress 3d engine

• In order to build games for ios,android and other platforms - you do not need to install and setup dependencies like unity and many other game engines. Godot can use pre-compiled export templates instead. All you need to port a godot game to your target platform is a single file- the template. If you want to build a template- that is when you have to setup the pain in the neck dependencies

• Godot has an actual 2d engine, sepparate from the 3d engine. The editor is designed for 2d games from ground up. Unity is a 3d editor and engine that has workarounds and tools for making 2d games.

These things make godot much easier to get started with than unity. Especially for quick experiments, it beats the hell out of both unity and unreal in terms of time to get it running.
The only time it would be slower to get started is when you want to build the bleeding edge version of godot from scratch. Even that takes about half an hour to set up and build to an executable to run- which isless than the time to register an account here, download unity, install it with its dependencies, set them up (again- android, ios,etc compiling needs some third party libraries last I checked)

Sure godot is far behind Unity for big 3d games and big projects relying on performance. But for 2d games and gamejams- it has already become much more viable than unity. Its just more convenient - some things are faster to do. It feels snappier, and the architecture and design of the engine feels a bit more fun to make projects in than unity.
Unity has become too big, slow and locked down for my taste

But yes, Unity has a huge lead on content, money,AAA titles, features. That doesn’t change its shortcomings for the indie crowd. It is almost as if godot devs know exactly what those shortcomings are and are constantly sweetening the deal. They are not competing, they are filling a niche that you have left

[ZigZarc]

@hippocoder

Yeah I would hate it if actual censorship occured. General discussion is fine in my book to talk about our industry. If a thread is locked in a censorship way and it smells off I want to know about it.

Unity has nothing to fear, if it goes around locking threads just because it’s competition was mentioned, well that says a lot about insecure feelings. But so far the locks I’ve seen or done were because of user behaviour that so happened to mention another engine. So it’s easy to blame it as censorship.

There was a long period when discussions about other engines were locked, along with a message that if you wanted to discuss that engine, go to their forums.

I think it much better that other engines are discussed here. Staying in the Unity forums means more chance of staying in the Unity engine.

During the locking period I consequently looked at the Cocos forums, then registered, followed by downloading and experimenting. If I wasn’t so far into a Unity project at the time, I would have left.

[mysticfall]

@blurymind

• Godot is much more stable than unity on linux. It runs flawlessly on linux ,mac and windows. Believe it or not. Unity on linux is almost unusable. Crashes so often you can call it a gamedev toy

I have to agree with this even though I’m still grateful for Unity people for wokring on the Linux editor at all, even in its current status.

Actually, I began using Unity specifically because I heard that they provide a free Linux editor. And before I moved to Godot, I’ve enjoyed using it despite of its many issues. It’s still in beta status anyway and honestly, there are not a whole lot of people who want to develop games on Linux, so I’m disposed to be more lenient about the issues I had with it.

However, those issues were quite severe and the tech support wasn’t always effective in resolving them. I had constant crashes and lock ups, and screen update problems, so I just had to accept it for a fact and got used to restart the editor when it happens.

And after I switched my Linux distribution to Manjaro, they had even stopped receiving my bug reports even when I attached a full stacktrace of the problem, saying they only support Ubuntu Linux for now.

Some of the severe problems, like UI components completely ignoring user inputs were resolved with the help from Unity developers. But some others were not, like a problem which has prevented me from actually building or playing any games.

The tech support representive was willing to go through quite a hassle to help me with that problem, even downloading and setting up my project on their end to test. I feel thankful for their effort, and was hoping to get the problem fixed soon since they said they were able to reproduce the problem. But I haven’t heard from them again since, even though it was a few months ago.

With Godot, on the other hand, I had a quite the opposite experience. As I was building a unreleased beta straight out of the source repository, I had quite a few crash issues and blocking problems. But I was usually able to find an issue reported by others already, and I also reported one when I wasn’t.

Regardless, all of them got resolved within a day or two, even just in a few hours sometimes. And the good part is, I didn’t have to way another week or a month to wait for a new release with the fix. All I needed to do was updating my source tree and build it again, and I was good to go.

I still don’t really want to turn this thread into Unity vs Godot, so I’ll refraining from writing such posts unless I see more of similar arguments from others which I feel to be unfairly comparing them.

But I have to agree that Godot provides a much experience for Linux users, and they would also appreciate the fact that it’s completely open source, considering their usual preferences in such matters.

[hippocoder]

@ZigZarc

There was a long period when discussions about other engines were locked, along with a message that if you wanted to discuss that engine, go to their forums.

I think it much better that other engines are discussed here. Staying in the Unity forums means more chance of staying in the Unity engine.

During the locking period I consequently looked at the Cocos forums, then registered, followed by downloading and experimenting. If I wasn’t so far into a Unity project at the time, I would have left.

Yeah I guess I’m not into locking threads about competing products so long as it doesn’t exist just to promote another product, which is IMHO obnoxious and doesn’t serve users of this forum.

This thread is open minded so it’s open.

[angrypenguin]

@mysticfall

Godot is about 4 year old now but already starting to catch up on Unity in 2D department, which is a 12 year old commercial product.

Unity may be 12 years old but, while it of course leveraged plenty of other existing stuff, Unity’s 2D stuff was only announced in 2013 if I’m not mistaken.

[mysticfall]

@angrypenguin

Unity may be 12 years old but, while it of course leveraged plenty of other existing stuff, Unity’s 2D stuff was only announced in 2013 if I’m not mistaken.

I see, then I think it’s just a case of one engine moving from 2D to 3D while the other going in the opposite direction.

As my statement regarding the issue wasn’t much to argue that Unity is lagging behind than to emphasize how fast Godot is improving itself, I’m glad to see that both engines expanding themselves in an area that they had been weak respectively.

And if Godot took similar time as Unity in doing so, I guess it proves my point that it’s a viable competition to commercial engines in making 2D games, and at least has some potential to become so in 3D department in future.

[Murgilod]

@angrypenguin

Unity may be 12 years old but, while it of course leveraged plenty of other existing stuff, Unity’s 2D stuff was only announced in 2013 if I’m not mistaken.

Not only that, but there was plenty of 2D assets on the asset store for long before then, and it isn’t terribly difficult to implement 2D in a 3D engine in the first place.

[zenGarden]

The most impressive 2D game is still Ori a Unity game.
While Godot has never been choosen to make impressive 2D games, will this change ? not sure.

[ChazBass]

@CarterG81

Godot has become more popular on /r/gamedev than Unity. At least, in discussion.

As someone who is on r/gamedev a lot (daily), I would disagree with this statement. There was a period of time (several months ago) when Godot posts were garnering a lot of discussion, but that seems to have died out to a great extent. Lately, release update posts, or even posts by game developers trying to drum up discussion, receive only a few responses–except for a recent one where some complainer from the Godot forums took a fight with the principal developer to Reddit (which was highly entertaining). Criticism generally runs along the lines of poor documentation, no tutorials, no community, etc.

I agree with the sentiment above that while it is cool, it will struggle mightily given the number of free alternatives already in existence (and in the case of Unity have massive communities, tutorials, etc). Having said that, I think the developer’s efforts to create a new engine optimized for 2D are truly admirable.

[PaulTaulborg]

If you are doing 2d go for Godot. For 3d, stay far far away. Not a single game has been released for 3d that’s been even remotely popular. Their current fb is a complete cesspool of fanboy/favoritism. (for example, their recent meme right now).

Also, make sure you don’t make any suggestions on their github regarding GDScript, as you will be shunned into oblivion by egotistical contributors. The engine simply shines in 2d development and it should stay like that. The developers are wasting their time adding all this 3d crap that is infused with mountains of artifacts and slow performance, especially when Unity / Unreal will always Trump them in that aspect.

And if you do decide to go 3d, have fun shipping your game and having it be smooth for 100hz+ monitor users. Their sponza demo even on low settings barely reaches 30-50.

2d and UI features is what they should be focusing more on, imo. 3d stuff is simply a waste of time

[Ryiah]

@PaulTaulborg

Not a single game has been released for 3d that’s been even remotely popular.

What does this have to do with the capabilities of the engine?

[PaulTaulborg]

@Ryiah

What does this have to do with the capabilities of the engine?

Because it would show what the engine is capable of doing? Nice nitpick btw.

[hippocoder]

Is this why engine threads get locked?

[PaulTaulborg]

@hippocoder

Is this why engine threads get locked?

Because I answered the OP with my opinion and some facts? So sorry for wrong think.

[Ryiah]

@PaulTaulborg

Because it would show what the engine is capable of doing?

Popularity has nothing to do with the engine capabilities. If popularity were the determining factor for engine capabilties then Minecraft proves without a doubt Java is the only way that is worthwhile to develop games… except it clearly isn’t.

[PaulTaulborg]

@Ryiah

Popularity has nothing to do with the engine capabilities. If popularity were the determining factor for engine capabilties then Minecraft proves without a doubt Java is the only way that is worthwhile to develop games… except it clearly isn’t.

Obviously my point was to illustrate the following point in my paragraph (which you didn’t address, and willingly ignored), is that there is a reason why no popular 3d games exist.