I’ve only been using Godot since Brackey’s first Godot tutorial where he made a platform game and from that I assumed Godot was for beginners, Unity Intermediate, and Unreal for top tier games.
But I was having a whale hacking out some code and getting a really basic 2D platform game that I don’t think I could’ve done on pretty much day one with the Brackey’s tutorial which I started adding onto. Ladders, bombs, particles, wall jumping, all basic looking but having fun all the while. I am not going to even try that in Unreal.
Why Godot, I saw my brother playing a TMNT gameboy game as part of a compilation on the PlayStation and I was thinking maybe I should get back to trying to make that 2D I had in Unity, before it went belly-up and nope not going back down that route and Brackey’s appeared and then the cogs started turning albeit a little slower these days, so, I was on my merry way. Not going to pretend it has been easy - not in the least and I had a lot of help here, but, it was fun.
Then I thought maybe I better learn a little more about what I am doing and bought a video course and the stuff I have learnt has opened my eyes a little bit more as to what Godot 4 can do - and I really think the gap has closed between it and Unity, as I remember it, as a platform. Godot (and Unity) will only ever be a 2D platform for me - 3D if I ever revisit it again will be Unreal, but, I am very unhappy about the guidelines they (Epic) has released. But for now I am happy with Godot. And I love the idea that there is virtually no time between making a change and being able to test it out.
I’ve been wondering what’s with this ideal of Godot not being as useful, Or as great for 3d as any game engine is , It can handle everything just fine. And introduces its own tricks every other game engine has,
For enchanting the performance/quality element with the engine. So it shouldn’t be pushed away when in the 3d discussion… As well as seeing how well it handles multiple, If not 100’s of my own models plasterd in a scene
(That singular model wasn’t animating or in a moving state. It was a t-posed mesh duplicated 100 times, Not using (occulusion culling - one of the features Godot gives.)
I once made a small 3rd person shooter with Unreal that had over 30 enemy models of very different sizes, some were massive compared to the “hero” character. They were all moving about the scene that would chase after you if you got to close attacking you with melee weapons, you could zoom in to shoot if needed and the amount of animations with the hero - I then included one enemy who would chase at you the moment they could see you and when got close enough would shoot - I thought that was rather cool. The 'hero" character had 5 different type of weapons and could switch them out through the inventory. Unreal had “behaviour trees” for “artificial stupidity” that were excellent in that scenario. Maybe Godot can do that as well, but, I haven’t seen anything resembling that, yet, but, I haven’t delved into 3D yet. If it can then maybe I have underestimated Godot yet again. One great thing about Godot is that it keeps on surprising me.
This might be only my personal bad luck, but Godot 4.2 on Mac couldn’t run their showcase third-person shooter demo. On 4.3 it works, but rather low frame rate. My own little low-poly 3D project is running well on Mac. On my Pixel 7 phone it shows a bright purple area instead of my sky texture. On web it has shadows which are light instead of dark. That does not build much confidence in the maturity of 3D…
Ahh, I never had an apple product so I’ll skip this one , Yeah… I don’t know about exporting a commercial 3d game to web- I just don’t wanna consider it, It’s not gonna be as easy, And it’ll need some of its own down porting, As you have to switch to things Godot makes compatible with web exports… But for Android exports. I haven’t heard too much of it in the 3d scene either-
I know android thankfully has the compatibility to run vulkan games on it. But even when just using the export template and sending it to mobile… I’d take it into consideration to turn off some features fully, Or have less utilization on features because I’m unsure how testing for mobile will be.
(The outcome could be the mobile build getting its own variant of the same game, That mobile phones won’t have issues struggling with it.)
Another feature that I just came across with Godot was Parallax Background/Layers.
After setting the background and the clouds all I needed to get it animating was:
one line of code
Only one . I couldn’t believe it. Had to make changes to the window size to get it working at fullscreen and I might have made a problems with that, but, it was great. I have a stage with 3 layers of parallax. I almost feel like a game designer now .
And the feature is being updated in 4.3, imagine if it gets even better. Godot keeps on surprising me.
Godot is such a pleasure to use. I feel the unity engine was going a diffrent direction felt like it was unfocused on making games. Godot feels more robust. And much faster to create games with. Godot is now the engine of choice for game jams.
I could never imagine Godot coming anywhere near Unity’s performance today.
And then Unity’s latest tech talk shows where they are going and it is exactly where I thought it should go. Even Unreal will be challenged by the sheer performance gains by Unity and the extreme ease of development with Unity 7.
I checked into Unity 7 lately, and I was surprised to hear that Unity 6 isn’t going to be released for another 3 days. Yes, what they are proposing is quite good, but, 7 is at least 2 years away. I was thinking that I might have to jump back on the bandwagon, but, not with it being so far away.
I’m not saying that I am going to stick with Godot by any stretch, but, switching to Unity is not the answer for me at this time. I know some users have had some problems with Godot 4.3, I am still on 4.2.2, so, I don’t want to go that direction. either.
no. Unreal is for people who can afford it who target high end hardware. Unity is just popular for having been somewhat free to use.
Godot is an engine like the others with it’s advantages and disadvantages.
godot requires you to study, at least read the docs, just like you have to do with unity and unreal. you won’t get far with just tutorials, as they sometimes do things wrong or ignore/don’t mention features for the sake of simplicity.
it also has its way of doing things, just like the others.
that’s more of a mac problem than godot’s. apple puts a lot of restrictions on developers that make working on it more difficult or not worth bothering with.
they still support apple products for some baffling reason.
phone GPUs tend to not be very good and not follow standards like PCs do.
I got glitches with among us, which was made in unity.
was this on safari? have you tried a real browser?
3D is designed with modern hardware in mind, compatibility, the lowest setting, runs on opengl 4, and is missing most of the advanced features. they recently added reflection probes.
2D works better on low end machines, that doesn’t mean 3D is not possible, just that you must lower your expectations for generic hardware because godot doesn’t carry a lot of legacy and backwards compatibility bloat like unity does.
I did the tutorial and it was a great introduction for me to Godot. In one hour I was able to have a 2D platformer up and running. After doing that I was adding things to it like ladders, enemies that weren’t floating, destroying enemies, ropes you could jump to, blowing up rocks, particles, wall climbing, double jump, coyote jumps, power-ups. Yes, with tutorials and this forum in particular, I got a long way before I ran out of things I could think of and bought a course on Godot from Udemy and it covered things I never would’ve found by myself (or avoid) and was completely out of my depth for a long time, but, I am slowly coming to grips with it, the animation player is still something I don’t get at all in Godot also Unity, and Unreal. But without that initial Brackeys tutorial I would never have even touched a game engine ever again - because I was not going back to Unity and Unreal for 2D which was my goal was never going to happen.
I found the Docs of Godot to be not much better than Unreal, which is really saying a lot. The docs from Unity where at least something I could understand and that from a martial artists who has been kicked, punched, chocked, joint-locked and thrown around the dojo more than I care to remember says a lot about the quality of their documentation - ie excellent.
, It can handle everything just fine. And introduces its own tricks every other game engine has,
.
. I couldn’t believe it. Had to make changes to the window size to get it working at fullscreen and I might have made a problems with that, but, it was great. I have a stage with 3 layers of parallax. I almost feel like a game designer now 