The team working on Godot Engine have released the first snapshot of Godot 4.3 which brings with it some big rendering changes that sound quite exciting overall.
According to the post they've done a "Major refactoring of the rendering system (GH-83452), which paves the way to several big improvements coming soon", one of which linked in the post is a collaboration with Google and The Forge to further improve Vulkan.
There's also now a new Direct3D 12 rendering driver, multiple controllers can now contribute to input actions, node groups can now be configured project-wide, freed objects are now treated differently from null in comparison operators, loading of scenes with corrupted or missing dependencies will no longer be aborted and an infamous bug causing areas to lose signal connections when pausing/unpausing the game has been fixed.
Meanwhile W4 Games, the company started up by some of the core Godot team, has announced their pricing for console port support for Godot. It's good to see a proper option out there now, as console support for Godot was something of a sore point for developers. The pricing may be a bitter pill to swallow for solo developers considering it's $800 just for a single console up to $2,000 for the big three together (and that's every year too), pricier still if you're a bigger team or if you have a publisher.
They did catch a fair bit of flak for it across social media that I saw, with multiple developers believing such console port support should have come from the Godot Foundation, not a separate company set up specifically to turn a profit like W4 Games (who have investors now). These developers mentioned the conflict of interest between the Godot Foundation and W4 Games, considering some people work for both. Various sources of developers not happy with it: #1, #2, #3 and so on.
For comparison on the pricing (specifically for console support):
- Unity: minimum $2,040 per-person per-year, plus the Runtime Fee or or 2.5% of your game’s monthly gross revenue when you hit $1,000,000 (USD) gross revenue on a trailing 12 month basis and 1,000,000 lifetime initial engagements.
- Game Maker is $800 a year.
- Unreal Engine is free until you hit the 5% revenue share (lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD).
- Defold is completely free.
Worth noting as well of course Godot is open source and no one is forced to use W4 Games, and any other company could make cheaper console ports too.
What are your thoughts on this?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: AdutchmanI don't think these pricing changes are very expensive. Keep in mind that the main alternative is Unity, which charges 1877 dollars per seat. Meanwhile W4 charges 800 dollars to port all your games with bug handling and the legal stuff taken care of. I can think this is not an unnecessary luxury with console companies, as I imagine their SDKs/rules to be quite finicky to get right. As for the Defold situation: they crucially do not guarantee bug fixes and/or legal help. I think 800 dollars is definitely worth it to have a guarantee that your game will keep working on all platforms, also from a sustainability standpoint.
Legal rule coverage and SDK support is pretty much a must when you do console port. Engine might be open source, but hardly anyone wants to handle Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo pro bono. It is proper minefield and you will want expertise on your side when planning port for these platforms.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: Nateman1000Open source creative software can not exist under capitalism and be successful if there is NO finances except for donations. Apart from a few you NEED a product to sell to have the money to maintain a project that bigI think if you look over the cases of open source software, even "creative software" that is successful, examples of that not being the case show up. These days they always seem to have "foundations" or stuff, but those exist mainly to wrangle the donations.
So for instance, I'm pretty sure Blender does not derive its success from a paid product. If anything, I'd say the existence of a company selling a paid product as a major adjunct to the open source project is more the exception than the rule. Wine has Codeweavers . . . but even there, I get the impression lately that Codeweavers spends less time selling their actual product and more time taking commissions to improve aspects of Wine from companies like Valve . . . i.e. acting kind of like it was a foundation wrangling targeted donations.
I think majority of income comes from companies that provide consultation and training for Blender, also Blender Foundation has some paid training available as well.
Unless it is government sponsored - I wish - these projects will need some revenue stream, directly, or indirectly. As long as there is balance between commercial interests and community, it is viable strategy and way to practically deliver open source product.
Last codebase update in 2022, the following on github describing their owm codebase:
* Linux Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Vulkan 1.1
Their github looks like of somebody who never did software development having .exe of installers publicly available anyway hosted there (7zip)
Last edited by STiAT on 1 January 2024 at 4:31 am UTC
Quoting: ObsidianBlkHonestly, W4 charging that amount to port to the consoles doesn't bother me. If I developed a game I felt could bring in the money, then 2k a year shouldn't be that bad. Additionally, if I could find another group that can port for cheaper, W4 is not standing in my way to go that alternate route.One of the bones of contention is that they are not independent: some people are working on both. To some extent I suspect it's unavoidable to mix (doing console work you'll eventually run into problems with the general infrastructure), but I can understand why some people see it as a conflict. Certainly things can get muddy if they're not careful.
As long as Godot's development remains independent of W4's console efforts, I'm content.
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