Godot is awesome. It's a great alternative to Unity. It has a friendly community (IRC). The all-in-one editor is nice. The scripting language is easy to get into and if you need to, you can extend the engine and scripting language with C++. And the export to windows, linux, mac, ios, android and web works actually quite well.<p>What's really nice is the notion of scenes which I prefer to the way scenes are handled in Unity. Scenes in Godot are are simply node-trees which you can instantiate in existing scenes. For example you create a character in a single scene which you instantiate in a level scene. I always had the impression that this favored encapsulation compared to highly interdependent components in unity.<p>What brought me back to unity was 3D, scripting and debugging. 3D in Godot feels limited. Shader graphs are not really usable, yet. It's a lot simpler to create something nice in Unity with the standard shader and some assets. And well, the debugger, it's simply not comparable to Visual Studio. Variables are sometimes not inspectable. I missed refactoring alot. And sometimes you need to dig very deep to understand how stuff works because many things are not yet documented.<p>All-in-all, I love Godot. It's a nice cross-platform development environment. I simply hope that I can come back later when all rough edges are gone.
One thing I don't get with game engines: why do they feel the need to make a X-like scripting language, where X=Python in this case, and X=JavaScript in Unity's case?<p>Why do they make people re-learn the specifics and slight differences of a language that has been around for more than a decade? On top of this, they are making their engines more difficult to maintain: bug fixes, new features, deprecation and backwards compat., keeping docs up to date, writing tutorials for the language, etc. etc.<p>I just don't see why these engines want to re-invent the wheel, even though what they end up with is simply a slightly modified wheel. /endrant<p>The engine looks cool however, and the fact that it's FOSS makes it a better option for budding game devs. I might give a go when I decide to make a simple game.
The features page looks well presented but has anyone actually used Godot? What are their experiences with it compared to writing your own games from scratch?
Anybody know if Godot has a business model behind it or is it co-ordinated purely by volunteers? Perhaps it's enough that improving the game engine via open source could help Okam Studio produce games more quickly?
Atomic Game Engine is also pretty sweet. I actually like it a bit more.<p><a href="http://atomicgameengine.com/" rel="nofollow">http://atomicgameengine.com/</a>
I really need to get around to trying Godot. I've had it installed since 1.0, but I've been too busy/lazy to try any (amateur!) gamedev lately.
Some meta discussion: "xyz reaches/releases version number 234234.324234" is entirely meaningless and the best way to ensure that nobody will care about your release announcement. Your project may internally have a very well defined and entirely logical policy as to how exactly to change version numbers based on internal project changes, but from the outside this is 100% untrustable and invisible, meaning your 2.0 release could mean anything from "we rewrote the entire thing" or "a set amount of time went by" (see Firefox/Perl/probably others).<p>If you actually care at all about your release announcement being read, include in the title line the actual benefit the new version provides to people.