
Godot Engine Awarded $50k by Mozilla Open Source Support Program - wyldfire
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-awarded-50000-mozilla-open-source-support-program
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wishinghand
This is heartening news especially in the wake of the licensing that Unity and
Unreal have rolled out in recent years. Sure, the terms aren't too onerous,
but it's always great to have at least one truly open source foundation in
your corner.

Interesting that Phaser was also a recent recipient of a Mozilla grant. Even
though it targets a completely different developer audience, it's cool to see
Mozilla take game making seriously.

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ValleyOfTheMtns
If you want to dabble with prototyping games, Godot is the way to go in my
opinion.

I've played with Unity and Unreal a bit, each with their own pros and cons,
but for me Godot is the one I found most intuitive and easy to test new ideas
with. Worth checking out.

~~~
crocal
Thanks for the tip. Did you have a chance to compare with gamemaker?

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hasahmed
Godot doesn't enforce any structure like game maker does. Additionally Godots
default language (Gdscript) is awesome and intuitive, whereas gml doesn't
really feel like a real language (argument0-15. Come on)

~~~
krapp
>Additionally Godots default language (Gdscript) is awesome and intuitive,
whereas gml doesn't really feel like a real language (argument0-15. Come on)

I agree with the comparison to GML, but whether one finds Gdscript intuitive
depends on one's existing background. I personally found it frustrating
because I was used to C/C++, but with time I can see getting used to it. It's
not a _bad_ language by any means.

Also, both Game Maker and Godot share the problem of their scripting language
being essentially a form of lock-in, since no one is going to use Gdscript
anywhere else, and any code you write it in is no longer portable. Also, they
use their own shader script rather than GLSL, which means your shaders aren't
portable either.

Godot can support different languages (unlike Unity or Game Maker), but IIRC
that requires recompiling the engine and may break the editor.

~~~
luladjiev
from Godot's documentation:

>Finally, one of our brightest additions for the 3.0 release: GDNative allows
scripting in C++ without needing to recompile (or even restart) Godot.

[https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/step_by_...](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/step_by_step/scripting.html#gdnative-c)

~~~
pjmlp
Given that Unreal only now added such support via [https://molecular-
matters.com/products_livepp.html](https://molecular-
matters.com/products_livepp.html) partnership, I wonder how Godot is actually
doing it.

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PinkMilkshake
Nice one! Such a great project.

Every time I go and have a play with Godot my mind is blown that the whole
program is a single ~45MB executable.

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pkalinowski
Godot approach to game development with nodes is superior to other solutions
IMO.

I think the biggest blocker for wider adoption is 3D performance and Inverse
Kinematics now. Without it, nobody will ever produce high profile game on
Godot.

~~~
gouh
Yes, if you come from Unity like me you will find Godot amazingly intuitive
and clean compared to Unity. No more weird workflow, no more prefab. Just
nodes in a tree and scenes.

With Unity you have many features, a big asset store that allows you to very
quickly prototype, the render engine is powerful, but the architecture &
organization is just a massive mess. It's really the kind of editor were you
can do everything because the dev added all the popular shiny features to make
fancy trailers but nothing is planned & well organized, all features are just
put one of top of another with no coherence.

Not only the the architecture feels complicated but the editor itself is super
heavy : mandatory Email & account, installation size of several GBs, etc.

Godot has less tools and the asset store has almost nothing on it right now.
The current render engine is not powerful but it is temporary, everything will
get re-written with Vulkan to be on par with other engines.

While it has not as many features as Unity, the foundations of Godot are
really solid & clean, I think this will be a huge advantage on the long term

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vanderZwan
> _The WP also includes work to make the editor work on mobile browsers, such
> as touch screen gestures, responsive UI, etc. This should also make it
> possible for us to port the editor to Android and iOS natively to tweak your
> projects on the go._

That sounds very ambitious, UI and UX wise. Wonder how that will turn out in
practice

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forkLding
Used Godot 3.1 for a game project recently, really surprised at how good it
is.

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ggambetta
FWIW, there's a semi-official Godot-SpatialOS integration by an Improbable
engineer: [https://improbable.io/blog/godot-spatialos-and-engine-
integr...](https://improbable.io/blog/godot-spatialos-and-engine-integration)

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MordodeMaru
So happy for these guys. Met them at GDC 2019 and their project is wondeba!

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speps
I was thinking "why not use bgfx?", thankfully it's already been discussed:
[https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/19602](https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/19602)

However, the arguments against bgfx seem to amount to "I want to do it
myself", a classic "not invented here" issue.

EDIT: found this too [https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-renderer-design-
expl...](https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-renderer-design-explained)

> Added to that fact, Vulkan still has years to go until it's properly
> supported in most desktop and mobile platforms, which makes it unattractive
> to implement for us (as it means considerably more effort to write, debug
> and maintain).

And then they're talking about the Vulkan PI in TFA which probably won't be
ready for some time too...

~~~
csdreamer7
> However, the arguments against bgfx seem to amount to "I want to do it
> myself", a classic "not invented here" issue.

I disagree. It has been 9 months since that post. bgfx still does not list
support for Vulkan. They already implemented DX12 and Metal. They still claim
support for Windows XP and Vista. Godot says it will get Vulkan support in 3.2
which comes out in a few months. Otherwise they would have to wait and work on
bgfx to get it working. DX9, XP, Vista, feels like a lot of baggage for what
Godot is right now. A very quick and easy to use game editor that easily
deploys on both Win and Linux.

Also, your edit links to a pretty outdated article (2017).

See Godot's about face on Vulkan here:

[https://godotengine.org/article/abandoning-gles3-vulkan-
and-...](https://godotengine.org/article/abandoning-gles3-vulkan-and-gles2)

> Vulkan was always a tempting alternative to solve them and to ensure we are
> much safer from driver bugs (after all, this is what the API was intended
> for). Still, the lack of support on macOS made it unappealing. Having to
> write a Metal backend to support this OS is a lot of effort for a platform
> not used very much.

> in a completely unexpected turn of events, it seems Valve has found an
> arrangement with the developers of MoltenVK (the commercial and proprietary
> Vulkan over Metal wrapper), ported Dota 2 to it, and got it open sourced.

> It seems to be a mostly complete Vulkan implementation that runs on macOS
> and iOS. This pretty much lifts the only barrier we had for moving Godot to
> it.

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wastedhours
Fantastic - whilst I need to run before I can walk with the dev I'm doing with
it, increasing the focus on multiplayer work using web tech should make it
easier to achieve some of the ideas that have been laying in notebooks for
years.

Congrats to the team!

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krizzo
This is great news. I recently just found out about this and have tried a few
things with ease. I can see this going as the standard game Deb for open
source if you don't want to or are unable to create your own engine /
libraries.

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cyborgx7
Godot is my game engine of choice. As a patron, I am now in very good company.

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shmerl
Godot is growing to be quite interesting. Hopefully they'll implement well
parallelized Vulkan support in some near future.

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ValleyOfTheMtns
It's coming up.

[https://godotengine.org/article/abandoning-gles3-vulkan-
and-...](https://godotengine.org/article/abandoning-gles3-vulkan-and-gles2)

~~~
shmerl
Yes, but hard to say how soon it will be implemented.

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ValleyOfTheMtns
Late reply here, but in a recent post Juan said that he would begin working on
the Vulkan port in May.

[https://godotengine.org/article/godot-32-will-get-new-
audio-...](https://godotengine.org/article/godot-32-will-get-new-audio-
features) (at the bottom)

In the post I previously linked he said he expected the port to take a "couple
of months", so we could expect it in any release made in the 3rd or 4th
quarter this year, maybe as early as July?

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sitzkrieg
Godot is great and im glad they secured some funds they will put to good use.
Right minds in the right place

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harryfcallahan
Great news! Love the PROJECT <3

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orliesaurus
Godot is ABSOLUTELY great, especially if you are a python developer! Thank
YOU!

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p0nce
Godot is a very impressive project.

