The new Vulkan backend is exciting for 3D projects and I am excited to try to dig into the new 2d tilemapping after work.
As well, gotta love experimental Rust support:
> With Godot 4, we introduce a new system called GDExtension. By design, it takes the best parts of creating GDNative extensions and writing custom engine modules using high performance languages such as C, C++ or Rust.
Anyhoo, kudos to the team for shipping. Building a generic game engine for the global audience is a massive undertaking.
Every once in a while I use a program where I just feel the authors think about software similarly to the way I do. Godot is one of those.
But yes, Godot 4 directly translates interfaces with .blend files.
They should have used C#.
Their motivations in creating GDScript are explained here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html#what-w...
As a programming language it's pretty reasonable. The built-in editor has auto completion and documentation, you can resume from errors. The syntax is basically Python with optional type annotations. Comparing the Godot vs C# examples in the documentation makes me shudder at how much more verbose C# is in comparison.
As others have pointed out you can use C# if you want to. They provide a separate download for it.
I personally like to use it. It's not perfect but it's a language that's tailored for the task it's doing, namely driving the high level logic of a game engine.
And most importantly it's beginner friendly, so it's pretty nice for people who want to get into programming.
They did...
If I were putting together a small-ish team with 1-3 people today, I'd be more likely to consider jumping onto Godot vs Unity. Godot is closing the gap.
The founders creating a commercial arm of the engine is critical. As a real studio, you need to be able to support consoles and you need to be able to pay someone money to fix broken shit in the engine when you have a scary deadline looming.
How is this sustainable through donations alone?
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...
Maintaining C++ support is expensive for an engine, just like maintaining any language binding. IMO, they should optimize for the most approachable/developer ergonomic language, which C++ definitely is not.
That said, I strongly disagree with their decision to simply build their own language. I think there are many languages that already exist that make better candidates for game development either because they are well known, well supported, or easily portable.
* Well known: Python is well known. GDScript is thus familiar. * Well supported: it's a first class citizen in Godot, that's all that matters * Easily portable: portable to what? it runs on the Godot engine. That's all the portability it needs.
I think they built their own language because of the integration with their Editor. It's not Lua or JavaScript or Python, but it works well enough for Godot in my experience.
It's likely due to being cross platform. What's happening is they're bundling the scripts and assets with a pre-built binary. If you're writing all c++ you're likely going to link in the engine instead, not the paradigm they support. That said I know you can extend the game engine, and there is some kind of plugin support for building native code, but you've got to do compile time support yourself? It even supports Rust now apparently?
Turns out most people doing the actual scripting don't use C or C++, rather tooling designed for game designers, level editors, scripting developers,....
Professional studios rarelly do everything in C++ for the last 20 years.
I'm talking introductory materials and an overview of the bigger ideas, not (yet) the nuanced details.
GDQuest is working on updating his content to 4.0 but even with the half off discount that stuff may be a bit pricey if you aren't sure you want to dive into the Godot world (his full compilation of Tutorials was like $379 before discount and individual ones are like $150 before discount).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrHQNOyU1q6BFEfkNq2CYMA [2] https://www.youtube.com/@BrannoDev
It's very easy to create simple toys with Godot, because it has a Python-like scripting and good UI.
After sorting out a couple minor snags in the build process (particularly around getting cross-compilation to work on Linux in GitHub Actions, and library validation entitlements for code signing), the finished builds work wonderfully on the M1 machines we've tested with.
