Unity has published the C# source for the UnityEngine and UnityEditor

Quoting: aislan

Quoting: GustyGhostStrategic closedness. Unreal Engine are doing the same, I believe.

Maybe Godot will eat their lunch if they're not careful.

Do you think Godot is better or on par with Unity right now?

It clearly isn't.
But that is also clearly a "yet".

Of all the engines, I think Godot has the greatest promise so far. It is just that well thought out and "manufactured".
If they can manage to get even more examples and documentation together, as well as improve the tech*, of course, they will be in a very good spot.

*Not that their current tech is bad, but the C#/Mono support is still not quite there. Instead they have this custom Python-like language which keeps many people away for "I don't wanna learn ANOTHER language" and performance reasons. It's really not a bad scripting language, but I would vastly prefer C# for the auto-completion capabilities and performance alone - and my personal distaste for non-static typed languages ;).
Also, Vulkan is on the horizon, which is awesome for obvious reasons.

I didn't dig in too deep, yet, so I don't really know about other fine details like performance in case of thousands of nodes on the screen, (does it have instancing?), etc.

Either way, the mere fact that it is pretty damn good already AND free is a huge plus.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 27 March 2018 at 2:51 pm UTC

Quoting: TheSHEEEP*Not that their current tech is bad, but the C#/Mono support is still not quite there. Instead they have this custom JS-like language which keeps many people away for "I don't wanna learn ANOTHER language" and performance reasons. It's really not a bad scripting language, but I would vastly prefer C# for the auto-completion capabilities and performance alone - and my personal distaste for non-static typed languages ;).

If your code is performance critical, you want GDNative and its C++, Rust or D bindings.

In any case, GDScript seems much closer to Python than JS based on code snippets.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: STiAT

Quoteand the C# reference source code is released under a license which only permits you to read the code, not modify it.

That means they're giving us the source code but don't let us help improve and bugfix the engine/editor if something is found? That's quite a strange step. Nobody says they'd have to give royalties out of hand, but that's a little strange to me. Maybe just the first step.

The point is, if you want it, legally you still have to buy it. If they open source it, they can still charge for it, but they can't stop other people from distributing it for free, so who'd pay? They'd need some kind of support model or something to not go out of business.

Well, that's about licensing, and yes, it's (partly) open source already since the source code is available. It's not free software though.

I don't say they should make it free software, but it would be nice if they allowed us to edit the code and send them patches for bugs or improvements found. I'm thinking about the way Id is doing it with the Unreal-Engine. You get the code if you subscribe, and you are still not allowed to redistribute it, but you are allowed to edit and send patches.

C#. Yuck.


Last edited by nattydread on 27 March 2018 at 12:47 pm UTC

I absolutely love Godot. The first time I used it, it just clicked. The Scene/Node-System is just very nice to work with.

Some people say that Godot is better than Unity, Unreal and CryEngine. Some people say that it looks better and performs better. I have yet to see actual demos that back up these claims. And I don't think I will see one in the next few years.

You can't just outperform commercial products that are being in development for multiple years by a developer that has an own department just for the renderer, where multiple people work only on this part of the engine full time for many years. Godots renderer was completely rewritten over the last 2 years, if I remember correctly, for the most part by one single person, and not full time.

Godot is nice just the way it is. FOSS is more important to me than pure technical prowess. That's why I use Godot.


Last edited by Doc Angelo on 27 March 2018 at 1:17 pm UTC

Quoting: tuubiIn any case, GDScript seems much closer to Python than JS based on code snippets.

Indeed, it is. Edited my post.
No idea how I came up with JavaScript *shrugs*

I like it for prototyping, but if I had to write something production ready in a game that I know will have certain performance bottlenecks, I'd rather write in something fast as Mono to begin with.
You can't write every piece of code that has a performance impact in C++, especially not if you are planning to deliver a game with modding capabilities (so you will use the same API modders will, more or less).
Plus, writing in a scripting language is just way faster, which is also worth a lot - otherwise you could just write the whole game in C++, and who does that any more?


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 27 March 2018 at 2:51 pm UTC

Quoting: aislan

Quoting: GustyGhostStrategic closedness. Unreal Engine are doing the same, I believe.

Maybe Godot will eat their lunch if they're not careful.

Do you think Godot is better or on par with Unity right now?

I have at most done only hobbyist size projects in either and it's been a while since I'd tried Unity so for whatever it's worth, if you're just cooking up simple 3D projects using one of the available scripting languages Unity and Godot are functionally identical (aside from that Godot groups everything as "nodes").

Quoting: GustyGhostStrategic closedness. Unreal Engine are doing the same, I believe.

Maybe Godot will eat their lunch if they're not careful.

Looking at how things have worked out in much of the software world, it's distinctly possible whether they're careful or not. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but in a few years. There are a whole pile of areas where anything platformy has tended to go open source over time. We happen to be operating in the one glaring exception (the desktop operating system), but as a general tendency the pull seems to be strong.