Is Godot all good?

it seems that Godot is just the ideal engine, at least to me. it feels like the end goal all developers want from an engine.
-open source
-great 2d and 3d support
-familiar code (python)
-the Godot team adds stuff from the community (example jolt physics engine)

so i dont mean to be a negative Nancy, but are there any bad things about Godot?

For larger studios: No paid, and thus available-on-demand, support option. Support is pretty much limited to online fora like this one, where you just have to hope that someone will answer your question.

I was gonna say, sometimes a feature is janky/broken for a while, but honestly, last I checked Unity still hadn’t fixed the grounded check for their character controller, so I don’t think that’s exclusive to open source projects like Godot - I think it’s just that game engines are huge complicated beasts. Also half the time when I notice some issue with Godot, the fix is already lined up to be released in a future version.

Idk, some people seem to have a lot of gripes with it, and I’m sure some of them will show up in this thread and share those. Personally, I think Godot’s basic model of how to structure a game (nested scenes, rather than prefabs being a special thing) is great, signals are easier to work with than anything I’ve seen in other engines, and just, I think they’re building good stuff on top of a really solid foundation. I’m quite happy about it.

3 Likes

Well, I’d say every engine has its pros and cons.
There are some things that I liked more in Unity, and some that I like more in Godot.

The only downside I experienced so far is mostly the file management.
Sometimes Godot crashes when moving files, files are dropped in the current selected folder and not the folder you’re hovering (like in any other windows programm I know). Sometimes the code editor says a script has errors until I remove a char and add it back to the mentioned line etc.
And moving files breaks references to instances in a scene.

I hope this gets improved sometime, but it’s nothing “gamedev” breaking imho.
Besides that I can’t say anything bad about Godot.
Others might have complete other issues. :smiley:

3 Likes

everyone has felt so positive about Godot. maybe because of how crappy everything is on the internet right now, its hard for me to believe that there’s a kind hearted development team that cares about devs. (i still know that they are a business that needs to make money tho I’m not naïve)

1 Like

One of my favorite things about Godot is that when there are issues or weird behaviors, it’s open source, so I can just go look at the code and see what’s going on (and maybe fix it if it wasn’t user error on my part). I think this outweighs almost every negative I’ve found and I’m extremely happy with it.

That said, the original question was downsides. Off the top of my head I’d say:

  • There’s a lot more development going on then can make it into the engine due to a bottleneck reviewing Pull Requests. This is understandable but I really think expansion here on the core team’s part would be a huge force multiplier.
  • GDScript is pretty good, but has a lot of warts/inconsistencies (meaningful whitespace, strong typing limitations, Callables/signals, somewhat half baked async, etc). There are other language options (which is awesome that they designed it this way) but they all have downsides too (some lang some runtime). I don’t think there’s a clear home run which is unfortunate.
  • I find the modal nature of the top level UI (2D/3D/Scripts/AssetLib??) to be pretty bad. It would be a lot better if they focused on the tabs and adapted to the type of resource being edited.

These are all pretty specific though, overall I think the project is awesome and I’ve had a much better time both using and adapting it than I ever did with Unreal or Unity.

4 Likes

i agree. everyone says unity and unreal are so easy but they were heck on earth for me to use. mostly cause of stupid errors. also making a flappybird clone in unreal costs you whole pc storage. at the end of the day i geuss godot is just the best engine for me and other studios or indie devs may find other engines more intuitive.

4 Likes

I consider Unity bloated. It really does not run well on lower end workstations. But then I am not writing a AAA game.

But your question is downsides: You can check the proposals list to see what people are asking for and give you an idea what features are missing are also the most popular requests

2 Likes

One of the downside for me is: is_on_wall().

It doesn’t work all the time, and worst of all it is supposed to be used after move_and_slide().

Yes, they are not easy! Especially when you delve into C++ only development in Unreal. The documentation is basically non-existent, and if you use the official forum expect to get no answers. On the official Unity forum and here I get really helpful answers some well above what I was asking and full code. There is just no comparison.

1 Like

I was going to learn unreal on my new laptop, but it kept crashing. Took me a week of troubleshooting that went nowhere.

Loaded Godot in minutes (vs hours) and started learning and building games.

2 Likes

That shocked me! I was expecting to download the engine after getting the installation files and it would be like several GB in size like Unreal that I did use back a bit and there was none of that. In fact, I thought I did something wrong and waited to see the Brackey’s tutorial to see what it was - there was nothing wrong :open_mouth:.

2 Likes

I use Godot professionally, and we’ve had overall excellent results.
It’s a great engine, but there are certainly a few little nitpicks (as there are with every engine).
Overall though, it’s been excellent to work with, and having come from multiple games on UE4 there have been a few challenges. So far nothing insurmountable :slight_smile:

3 Likes

what studios and games have you made/worked with

(was that directed at me?)


And currently:

now in alpha

There’s 5 or 6 others under NDA, but can’t really count those :smiley:

1 Like

quite the portfolio and yes i was meaning u. i might check some of those games out

2 Likes