Godot Engine – A decade in retrospective and future

A very well written and inspiring post. I haven&#x27;t used Godot much, but I feel 2020 and the next decade is going to continue growing much more :)<p>&gt; This was an extremely hard decision to make [work full time in Godot], because at the time, my experience (...) was paid a lot more, and I was receiving extremely good job offers(...). [T]he same happened to Rémi (an Energy Engineer), who also changed his life plans and profession to work full time for the project.<p>It really speaks of the love for the project. I hope the motivation and joy for writing the engine is balanced with the right compensation.

I wonder if Godot has a chance of becoming the Blender of game engines. From the way it is growing it&#x27;s starting to look like a real long-term possibility to me, especially for the smaller game studios.

It seems like some of you have some real love for Godot. How come you decided to use&#x2F;recommend Godot over Unity when it was less mature? Was it much better along some axis that Unity didn&#x27;t provide? What makes it better along that axis?<p>Usually happens when something is 10x better at something new that people care about that the incumbent is blind to or is structurally incapable of addressing. I&#x27;m just wondering what it is in this specific case.<p>Ease of use? Beginner friendly? Open source so you don&#x27;t have to pay? The node system makes it easier to do X?

I am coming back to Unity for a side-gig VR thing after not touching it for a couple years. Unfortunately the timing is not great since they are still sorting out all the new offerings (XR Plugin vs. Player settings, Input systems, ECS from prefabs, etc.)<p>Is anyone doing VR with Godot? I have a couple questions:<p>1. What&#x27;s the development cycle look like? In Unity I can hit play and put on the headset (Oculus Quest w&#x2F; Link, so essentially a Rift). No need to export a full build or go through multiple steps. Honestly this is the single most important factor for me since it allows quickly figuring out other problems. Does Godot support it?<p>2. Unity has made a big deal about DOTS and from initial tests it&#x27;s legit. For VR on low-powered headsets (ultimate target is Oculus Go) these performance savings matter. How does Godot compare?<p>3. I don&#x27;t know C++ and worried that I wouldn&#x27;t be able to squeak by from bad usage of it. GDScript looks interesting but in this use case performance matters. I am doing a significant amount of Rust these days esp for hobby projects and would LOVE to be able to code in that. Are the Rust bindings to Godot good? Does it interfere with quick iteration? (looking at the repo it&#x27;s hard to see what&#x27;s going on and what the impact is on a real project)

I&#x27;ve been using godot for about a year now, and really like it. I am really excited about the upcoming vulkan renderer which should help with my main gripe which is no ambient occlusion. Some people have found some novel ways around it but I am choosing to just focus on my gltf assets and work on my blender skills in the meantime.<p>Linux native gamedev is possible!

That the Godot scene editor is made with Godot seems to be an excellent example of how eating one&#x27;s own dog food can exercise and improve the basic technology.

I&#x27;ve been using Godot engine for the past two months now, I evaluated both Unity and Unreal Engine of course, and in the past I&#x27;ve built my own 3D engine (took me 2 years, C++ with Lua scripting, OpenGL 3.3+).<p>What got me started with Godot was the fact that it is completely open source, and I was evaluating also writing my project with Rust, and Godot had already support for interfacing it&#x27;s scripting interface NativeScript even with Rust already (although much work in progress).<p>Ultimately I decided to develop the project with mostly C++, but during learning the engine I noticed that GDScript is very capable and seems even faster than Lua at least according to my 2 month experience, mostly coming probably from the fact that it has native types like vectors and matrixes and so on integrated directly into the scripting language and implemented with C++.<p>I was pleasantly surprised how easy and logical the engine is to use, they&#x27;ve made a lot of correct decicions when it comes to the technical viewpoint, for example getting engine scripts written with C++ was very easy, which surprised me.<p>The documentation is also very well written, with up-to-date examples and I haven&#x27;t seen any missing information yet.<p>Only thing I&#x27;ve been missing is more complete examples of games utilizing C++ for example, and more complete projects to be looked at as an example. Most of the projects I could see were written mostly with GDScript, so I would have wished to see more indepth and professional examples in how to write performant projects using Godot.<p>But mostly GDScript even seems to enough to implement most of the game or application logic.<p>For me though, the fact that the engine is open source and that people are actively fixing issues in it, and I can even contribute myself is a big factor. The MIT license also grants me to do whatever I want with the end product, which is a big plus.<p>I hope to contribute to the project as I go along, been looking at the source code and it&#x27;s really readable also, the architecture is pretty solid and clean at least according to my quick evaluation of the project.<p>I&#x27;m projecting great success for Godot in the next year, especially with the upcoming Oculus Quest support already well under way, this could be a easy and more flexible way for people to get into VR development possibly.

Trying to find the best way to introduce friends&#x2F;family (with programming backgrounds) to game programming for fun. (So not kid-focused stuff like Scratch or Logo.)<p>Godot looks pretty good. Is there anything else you&#x27;ve had success with?

What&#x27;s Godot&#x27;s C# support like nowadays? I remember there being some criticism of the early implementation, but I haven&#x27;t checked back recently.<p>I keep on getting really curious about Godot, it seems like an engine that should be up my alley, and I really am in the market for Open Source engines. I don&#x27;t want to keep coding everything myself.<p>But I&#x27;m a little thrown off by the idea of learning a new scripting language, and dipping into C++ for an engine like this seems counterproductive. If I cared that much about memory management, I&#x27;d probably write a game-specific engine again.

We&#x27;ve just switched to Godot from Unity 2 months ago (we&#x27;re doing VR), and I will never go back.

I keep debating whether I want to commit time to doing a hobby project in Godot or Unity (yes, I know I should just pick one and do it). Unity has made massive strides but I just find Godot so damn pleasant to work in, especially with code editing being built right into the editor and GDScript being such a nice language.<p>I can really see Godot becoming the Blender of game engines. Kudos to the team!

I have nothing but love to give for Godot and its incredibly dedicated community. Sure, it&#x27;s still rough around the edges, but many of my gripes (e.g. poor documentation) have been slowly fixed over the years and I&#x27;ve been recommending it to people new to game dev (although not necessarily new to programming) in order for them to tinker on and make their first games with.

Great post. Is there a 3-year, 5-year, even 10-year roadmap for Godot? It&#x27;s a tool I&#x27;m very interested in using but the industrial backing and stability of Unity&#x2F;Unreal is hard to beat. Some kind of assurance that the creators of Godot plan (or at least hope) to keep working on the project for a long time would go a long way.

I&#x27;ve been looking for a lightweight 2D engine to use on Android. Something I can use to build simple 2D games with small binaries that load quickly and run on lots of hardware. (Like I might use SpriteKit for on iOS.)<p>Should I look further into Godot Engine, or is it more of a &quot;heavyweight&quot;&#x2F;loads-of-features engine like Unity and Unreal?

Interesting post. I haven&#x27;t that much experience with Godot, but I found the recently published YouTube Video where Juan explains the source code quite interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5RIPRlCvRAk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5RIPRlCvRAk</a>

It&#x27;s nice to have a dark editor theme included for free ;) (Looking at you, Unity. What you&#x27;re doing is not cool at all.)

<i>&gt; The new rendering architecture will also allow companies working on console ports to more efficiently port the engine and offer our users the possibility of running their games on the most popular game consoles (something we will, unfortunately, never be able to offer officially due to legal reasons, thus forcing us to cooperate with companies porting it on their own).</i><p>I didn&#x27;t quite understand that part. What legal reasons prevent them from making ports for consoles? Do consoles ban open source projects?<p>Also, are they planning to use some translations layers like for DX12 and GNM from Vulkan when working with Xbox and PlayStation? Would be nice if gfx-rs could offer a GNM target for the Vulkan portability option.<p>Alternatively, Sony and MS can of course start offering an option to use native Vulkan, as they should have from the beginning.

I&#x27;ve become a big fan of Godot over the past six months or so. The open development model is a breath of fresh air compared to most game engines.<p>The node system seemed weird to me at first, but it&#x27;s really grown on me. I can heartily recommend the engine now.

Does anyone have any experience or knowledge about the process of porting a Godot game to consoles?<p>I know it’s not built into Godot because all the sdks&#x2F;apis are behind NDAs for the consoles, I was wondering how difficult it is, what it entails and if anyone has experience going the suggested route of hiring the company on the Godot site to do the porting.<p>More so than performance this would be the biggest blocker for Godot I would think ( not that it’s in any way it’s Godot fault ... it’s consoles being consoles )

As a side project to get me back into lower-level programming, I&#x27;ve had the pleasure of working on a personal fork of Godot.<p>The engine&#x27;s simply fantastic from a programmer&#x27;s perspective. The code is readable, the architecture is quite intuitive, and with the exception of a few engine components, you don&#x27;t run into much in the way of incomprehensible spaghetti code.<p>Adding features is more or less trivial, as has been merging upstream modules from more modern branches into the project.<p>I see a bright future for the engine, especially after the 3.1 update, and I anticipate that it&#x27;ll start seeing significant commercial adoption in the second half of this decade (it needs a few more years of refinement and PR).<p>The release of the Vulkan renderer will be a massive boost to public interest, and developers will increasingly consider it for their next projects.<p>That said, I do have a few concerns about its development. I&#x27;ll preface these critiques with the fact that I&#x27;m working from 3.1 stable, and have only merged from 3.2 as needed.<p>There&#x27;s a wide-spread conception among the Godot community that Godot&#x27;s performance (especially in 3D) is abysmal. This has been blamed on a number of factors, such as the memory model (largely heap-based), and the rendering engine (it uses quite a bit more cpu time than it needs to).<p>It is exactly the second-issue that has lead many community members to see the Vulkan renderer as Godot&#x27;s salvation. I can&#x27;t speak to that, but as is, many of the criticisms Godot faces are legitimate.<p>But among the projects I&#x27;ve seen where performance has been an issue, it&#x27;s largely been the product of a developer&#x27;s failure to understand how the engine is processing their content, and by extension their failure to architect their game around that.<p>This is an issue many inexperienced developers run into on just about any engine. Godot also lacks editor tooling that would allow anyone but a programmer to easily mitigate these issues in a scene, even if they knew where the performance issues were. This, compounded with the fact that Godot has largely focused on accessibility first and foremost has resulted in a lot of inexperienced community members without much understanding of the engine&#x27;s internals to discourage people from even trying to adopt the engine for 3D projects until 4.0.<p>I hope that 4.0&#x27;s release will be enough to minimize what I believe to be largely a PR issue, but I also fear that the inevitable bugginess that comes along with an entirely new rendering architecture may just exacerbate them, or that it will simply fail to live up to the expectations of many people who expect a more modern renderer to somehow fix their poorly considered code.<p>I&#x27;m concerned that this will slow the engine&#x27;s development with respect to its tooling, as there are few people really testing the bounds of it&#x27;s capabilities and workflows.

Anyone have some good example project online, that utilizes more C++ scripting or custom Godot modules even ?<p>This was the only thing I could not easily find when trying to peruse the projects utilizing Godot online.

Any recommended learning resources for Godot?

Isn&#x27;t Unreal Engine an alternative in 3D space?