“The team at Re-Logic has been watching the recent events surrounding Unity with both interest and sadness. The loss of a formerly-leading and user-friendly game engine to the darker forces that negatively impact so much of the gaming industry has left us dismayed to put it mildly. While we do not personally use Unity (outside of a few elements on our console/mobile platforms), we feel like we cannot sit idly by as these predatory moves are made against studios everywhere.
We unequivocally condemn and reject the recent TOS/fee changes proposed by Unity and the underhanded way they were rolled out. The flippant manner with which years of trust cultivated by Unity were cast aside for yet another way to squeeze publishers, studios, and gamers is the saddest part. That this move was wholly unnecessary pushes things into the tragedy category - a cautionary tale the industry will not soon forget.
We do not feel that a simple public statement is sufficient. Even if Unity were to recant their policies and statements, the destruction of trust is not so easily repaired. We strongly feel that it is now equally important to get behind some of the other up-and-coming open source game engines. Lighting some candles in an otherwise dark moment.
To that end, we are donating $100,000 to each of the open source engines listed below [Godot and FNA]. Additionally, we are sponsoring each of these projects with $1,000/month each moving forward. All we ask in return is that they remain good people and keep doing all that they can to make these engines powerful and approachable for developers everywhere.
Re-Logic has always been supportive of game developers and indie studios that do things the right way. We feel that our actions in this moment are the best way to carry that mission forward - by accelerating and strengthening competing open source game engines, we hope to empower and assist studios that are struggling with how best to proceed given these recent events.”
Very much reminds me of Children of a Dead Earth as far as configurability goes… down to the cartridge! I will very much be keeping my eye on your great work here :)
Thanks for your kind words! Everything is already functional! Just didnt have graphics for my designers yet.
Coade gave inspiration for editors for sure, but there are some key differences in overall gameplay based on my perceived shortcomings.
Grand campaign and history
Rixas will have a grand campaign that lasts 70 years(tech wise) in a fictional world that allows for organic military buildup and worldbuilding setup.
Real cost, time, logistics, materials
Currently this is abstracted, but things in rixas need proper tooling, resources, and transport to warehouses or the frontline (check out my stockpile video for a sliver!).
Persistent grand battle map w rear line
All squads on the map doing their thing at once. This includes real supply trucks, field kitchens, hospitals, mechanics, etc!
My bad! I just got a proper look and I’m downloading right now, I wish you good luck in development! I’m maybe 1% to a prealpha for my own and can’t quite find the time, making a game is hard!
Oh no worries, it wasn't rude at all, I just wanted to point out the differences! I like COADE but just find it a bit lacking for my liking. Also, thank you very for your donation!
Rixas is a project that I have been working on in Godot for a long time! (I placed my bets against unity correctly!)
I also think it's a great project to show how Godot can be used for more intense processes!
Thanks to the generous support of the community, Rixas will be available on Steam!
A completely free(forever) grand strategy game where you control everything about your army, air force, and navy.
In Rixas, you will possess the heads of your country's military throughout time. You will be able to create gear down to the finest details. The loadout of every soldier and composition of every platoon is under your control.
Politics is at large, as it is in any other organization. You don't have full control over the government or your subordinates. People need time to be convinced of new ideas or equipment, and victory can make a nation complacent.
If you are curious and want to see more, check out the itch page or my other socials, or ask me anything!
In the context of the talk, the backend is a web server. Do all single player games need a web server? No. If they wrote “Most games today”, I wouldn’t bother.
Calling the engine + logic a game backend wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but again, that’s not the backend the talk will be about.
Some of my own thoughts, which rebut the article in parts:
Godot does have "barbell performance" - you can make it go fast if you drop to C++ and do low-level engine things to add new nodes, resources, etc. You can also make it go fast when you use the premade nodes without a great deal of script in between(and the nodes are, FWIW, pretty flexible and composable). What it doesn't do at present is the thing Unity users are used to, which is "fast scripting". Fast scripting still means working around the garbage collector and the overheads of going between native and a runtime. C# is a kind of flytrap for the needs of high-end games, and Unity has only seemingly surmounted the issues by doing a lot of custom engineering for their use-case. That is, you don't really code standard C# in Unity, you code Unity's C#, which is nearly as bespoken as GDScript.
Saying the engine is coded in a naive way is actually not as smart as it seems, because there's a maintenance cost to always doing things in exactly the most optimal way. The target for what is fastest changes every time the platform changes. As a (up until recently) relatively small project, it's overall better that the engine stay relatively easy to build and straightforward to modify, which is what it's done. The path it's taken has helped it stay "lightweight". The price of that is that sometimes it doesn't even take low-hanging fruit that would be a win for 90% of users.
The 3D in Godot 4 is capable of good test scenes, but everyone seems to agree that it's not really ready for production for speed reasons. Any specific point on this just backs that up. And that's disappointing in one sense, but pretty okay in others. If you need high-end graphics, Unreal will welcome you for the time being.
On that note, developing for console always comes with fussy limitations, at minimum just meeting TRC/TCR/lot check; that's why professional porting is a thing. Engine devs usually end up in the position of maintaining these multiple-API abstractions because it's necessary for porting. It's the same deal with the audio code, the persistent storage, the controllers, the system prompts, it just goes on and on like that. So, rewriting the rendering bindings to do things in the D3D way and not the Vulkan way is actually a bit of a whatever; it's more rendering code. It changes some assumptions about what binds to what. But it accesses the same kind of hardware, running the same kind of shaders. A lot of ports in the not-so-distant past basically had to start over because the graphics hardware lacked such a common denominator.
The author's bio says that they have been doing this as a professional for about 5 years, which, face value, actually means that they haven't seen the kinds of transitions that have taken place in the past and how widely game scope can vary. The way Godot does things has some wisdom-of-age in it, and even in its years as a proprietary engine(which you can learn something of by looking at Juan's Mobygames credits the games it was shipping were aiming for the bottom of the market in scope and hardware spec: a PSP game, a Wii game, an Android game. The luxury of small scope is that you never end up in a place where optimization is some broad problem that needs to be solved globally; it's always one specific thing that needs to be fast. Optimizing for something bigger needs production scenes to provide profiling data. It's not something you want to approach by saying "I know what the best practice is" and immediately architecting for based on a shot in the dark. Being in a space where your engine just does the simple thing every time instead means it's easy to make the changes needed to ship.
Regarding your 2nd point, absolutely correct. But man does it look good in a hit piece such as this article. Appeasing the needs of the many is a delicate procedure that sometimes involves using in-engine data structures and not just fixed length arrays, much to the chagrin of the author. Less maintenance at the very least.
Regarding your 4th point, Godot can accommodate the need for precompiled shaders, it can add adapter layers around its Vulkanic render pipeline, it can technically play by console rules. But there is the one thing that it can’t do. It can’t just publish usage of a proprietary API to a public git repo. That will always be the albatross around Godot’s ass. But I would pose the following question: is this a flaw of Godot or a flaw of the status quo, which forces FOSS into a permanent song and dance to be on equal footing with private enterprise?
The irony of this line from the post is particularly amusing:
your willingness to talk about things you could not possibly have all the information about this confidently, and with so little tact, is a sign of inexperience.
Major companies messing up are a great boon for open source projects. Much like how Lemmy got support from Reddit messing up, Godot is now having its time in the spotlight. I’m feeling better and better about switching to more open source apps and platforms throughout the year, I only hope the trend continues!
Comment by the previous community forum owner (before the one that shut it down) that I feel should also be put in this thread
While I cannot speak for Cybereality and his experiences and feelings on Godot and such, i can speak a bit more on the forum side of things.
I ran the Godot Community Forums for 4 years and 7 months, back when Godot 3.0 wasn’t even in alpha yet. However, I resigned in May 2023 and handed the reins over to Cybereality, whom I believed would run the forums similar to how I did and seemed enthusiastic to do so. I resigned because I realized I didn’t have the time to dedicate to it like I felt a leader should and so, instead of being at the helm but not having the energy to properly help the forums grow, I stepped down. Simply put: I was burning out and didn’t have time to run the community, and Cybereality offered to take over it and so I passed it along.
I did not expect this turn of events and I am saddened by the entire thing. I understand being frustrated with the direction Godot can take, the difference between expectations and reality, and can sympathize with not running a community you do not believe in. However, I am most saddened that the community we built together on the forums is frozen in place simply because of an individual’s feelings on all this. The forums was more than just one individual, even if that individual was the owner of the forums. I know there are great people in the Godot forums that may have been willing to take it over should he have offered. Cybereality is a good person, and I wish him the best, but it saddens me to see years of community be locked in place. The forums grew so much in the last few years and has become a wealth of information on Godot, and while I am glad it is kept in read-only mode rather than being deleted, it pains me to see the forum community this way.
Something I’d like to address though, because I think there is a bit of a misconception on how long Cybereality has run the forums and what that means finically. I’ve seen a few claims that he’s spent hundreds or thousands on the forums.Cybereality has only run the forums for a few months, since May 15th. The reason I bring this is up is that, prior to this point, I was solely funding the Godot forums for the entire 4 years and 7 months, I did not take donations, run ads, or ask anyone to help fund it. While I understand that Cybereality has claimed to have spent hundreds (and he may have! I didn’t have paid plugins and such, and my server provider didn’t charge for bandwidth/vistors), I know for a fact that the forums cost (roughly) a couple hundred a year when I ran it, not hundreds a month. He certainly has not spent thousands on the Godot forums if he ran it the way I did. He has only spent his own money on the forums since May when we transferred the server to him, prior to that the forums were funded entirely out of my own pocket and no one else’s. I don’t know what server he used, whether he paid for bandwidth, how expensive the plugins he bought were ,etc., but I do know that the notion (implied or otherwise) he’s been paying for the forums for years is false, he’s only been paying for it for a few months.
Finally, the forums were never an official Godot social platform and we were entirely community driven, unlike the other Godot communities that are linked on the Godot community page. The forums was also linked on the Godot community page, but we ran our own ship, had our own set of rules (we observed and adhered to the Godot Code of Conduct, at least while I ran it), and forum staff (entire volunteer!) were composed of people from within the Godot forums community. We managed ourselves and did our best to make a healthy community. I can confidently say that the forum staff I worked with were some of the most talented people who really cared about the community and helping everyone use Godot, and we all spent countless hours of our free time to make the forums what it was. We truly tried to make it a place for all Godot developers, at least while I was running it.
It saddens me to see that it all went down this way and I’m sorry for everyone on the forums who enjoyed and participated as part of the community. I hope you all find new communities to join that are just as special as the forums. I also hope that Cybereality finds another project he can believe in and is able to pour his enthusiasm into that project and help whatever community he lands in next grow. I wish everyone I interacted with over the years on the forums the best and I hope you all keep making games (with Godot or otherwise) and find great communities to be a part of.
Will someone please tldr or link me to some info about the complaints against Godot? I’ve been under the impression it’s a popular and well regarded project.
Theres been some confusion recently with W4 games and godot. Essentially some people who run godot made a company called W4 games to handle things such as console ports that godot itself cant do due to being open source. W4 games raised 8.5 million dollars from investors w4games.com/…/w4-games-raises-8-5-million-to-supp… and recently godot has created a blog post saying they need more funding godotengine.org/…/funding-breakdown-and-hiring-pr… .
One of the arguments thats been going around is why is godot saying theyre going to scale back development and say they have lack of funding when W4 just got a big investment. The thing is though that the two entities are separate and have separate income and goals
Heres some points people have made for and against this
As separate as they might be, the W4 link does say, in its title, that the money raised was for “Godot Engine Growth”. I can see why people are not happy about this.
W4 link does say, in its title, that the money raised was for “Godot Engine Growth”.
From reading through the forum thread replies (I’m not familiar), it sounds like W4 is a separate legal entity than the Godot foundation, and the $8.5M in question is from commercial investors.
If true, then it would literally be fraud to use that $8.5M for other than it’s intended purpose, which unfortunately seems to mean something different than actually working on the Godot engine itself.
Yeah with that though its extremely vague what they mean by growth. Technically having the possibility of console ports in godot is some form of godot engine growth and would attract people to the engine who might be still using something like unity due to the capability to export to switch, etc.
The second paragraph is
The funds will be used to expand W4 Games’ core team and accelerate the development of a suite of products and services for the Godot ecosystem, enabling all developers to create and publish games and applications on all major platforms. The company will present its product roadmap at GDC 2023.
Wow, so this guy sabotaged a community of almost 5 years in just a few weeks because he couldn’t understand how financials work. And has now left it open with a big “Scam warning” at the top, that will damage the reputation of the entire project.
Maybe he should pass it on to someone else instead of acting like an overgrown child throwing a tantrum.
Yep. The communication about funding could be way better from Godot, but this forum maintainer is at best naive, if not completely delusional.
They don’t understand how hard running a large open source project is:
They call them amateurs for not fixing long standing issues that they probably just don’t have time to get to.
They complain about a one line change/fix not being merged for supporting mix-mode lighting - both pre-baked and real-time. I need to double check that I didn’t misread that because of how absolutely insane that sounds.
They complain about broken stuff without realizing all the stuff that reliably just works in Godot.
They complain about 4.0 being called “stable” without realizing that stability refers to API contracts not being broken (at least this is the case, according to another forum member).
They also think game engine development is easy apparently because they could get something working in months of working with OpenGL or such, that probably doesn’t support all the same features, isn’t as nice to use, isn’t as cross platform, etc.
They also think they are so well informed about the engine development because they made literally one contribution to the Godot code. They have been using Godot for years but that just still screams of a lack of knowledge of all the Godot internals and how OSS development works.
They complain about a case where MIT licensed code was used without attribution. Legitimate concern but very likely just an oversight. Godot has a copyright file with detailed attributions and someone else indicated the code was adopted from a long time ago.
I get that it’s frustrating seeing a new version of software not fix your problems, but this person really just doesn’t know what they're talking about. They have some legitimate concerns/complaints, but calling it a scam so publicly is just completely ridiculous.
I read the post and I really think they are in the wrong. A few things stand out, and the forum owner seems more upset that feature A and feature B don’t exist or are not like the other engines.
Sounds more like the issues with Godot and W4 are the same issues loads of startups have, and it’s not going well. To call it a scam and a grift just sounds like buzz wording to make Godot and W4 look bad.
But this stood out
Well, strange, if someone made it in 1 night, they could certainly fix it in 1 night.
Exactly. To me, if you tell me someone made something complicated in one night, I just hear “hacky proof of concept that would take weeks to get right”.
Previous owner of Godot Community Forums got burned out and didn’t curate the first month of co-owning this platform - here we have a clear-cut case study against prematurely transferring ownership. One could look at it and think that Cybereality took over the forums only to sabotage them in a few weeks. But it might be a rather spontaneous product of zir heated discussion and disagreement with Juan, so I’d write this off to a “happy” coincidence. Cybereality already explained it’s about confusion around allegedly broken promises with W4 and Godot Foundation.
Looking at the bigger picture, it’s a case study of problems with centralization of community in confines of something close to walled garden, around the project that is supposed to be as open as a vocabulary. More the reason to raise awareness of Lemmy communities, Matrix Public Archive, etc.
IMHO this has the typical hallmarks of a psychotic episode, with paranoia and rash decisions like that. They will probably regret it in a few days and re-open the forum.
Right now it’s a little harder to answer as the support resources for learning Godot are all in the process of being updated from the way things were done in the old Godot 3.x to the new Godot 4.x system. The changes aren’t huge from a learning perspective and largely I’d say the Godot 4 way (where it differs) is actually a little easier to learn.
For example, this is a wonderful free interactive course on how to program in Godot (which is one essential skill for making games in Godot and probably the biggest sticking point for new developers) however it was made for Godot 3.x (I think 3.5 specifically…) so… It would be a good place to go learn the basics of how to program in Godot but you’d have to do so with the awareness that you’ll be learning some stuff that you’ll need to update your knowledge of at some point for Godot 4.0 (for example, when you are programming for a character to move on screen there’s a command you can use called “move and slide” that tells Godot that you’re done setting up for it and it should make your character do movement stuff now. In Godot 3.5, you need to explicitly tell it to use the movement speed you just told it to decide how fast your character should move. In Godot 4, you just tell it the movement speed then tell it to do movement stuff and it does it. Slightly quicker and easier in Godot 4 but if you use the exact same code from Godot 3.5 it’ll throw up an error until you figure out what needs to change.)
Anyway, here is the course for Godot 3.x (fyi, you can still download and use Godot 3.x if you wish, but you will eventually want to switch to Godot 4, so it might be better to just use the slowly appearing new educational content for that rather than the more extensive stuff for Godot 3.x… It’s just a transitional time right now.):
They are also working on a new Godot 4.0 version but because the course actually recreates the effect of what you are doing live as though you were working in Godot (by using a modified version of Godot in the background) it’s a lot of work. Surprisingly it looks like it might only be a couple of months before some sort of 4.0 version appears.
In terms of Godot 4.0 tutorials, Heartbeast’s first one (a simple black and white 2d platformer) is 99% finished (I think he has one final video to do but it should be out long before you could catch up to it if you started today). I haven’t watched it but his stuff is usually quite good and often recommended:
Seconding learn-gdscript from zero by GDquest. VERY few other tutorials work if you literally don't know how to code at all, GDquests is the only one I know that'll teach you the basics.
MIT may attract more people… but why would that be people who would contribute back in the direct you want? I’ve seen many MIT extentions for Godot, maybe they would have some insight.
Most indie devs make their MIT Godot games proprietary and I doubt peer pressure has ever stopped companies from taking MIT work and making it proprietary before. If software freedom of your users is important then the copyleft aspect is an important way to protect their freedom. Imo, not worth losing that on the off-chance it all goes well.
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