It’s great that Godot was in a good place when Unity had its (inevitable?) implosion. Having used both engines I think they are comparable enough that Godot was a perfect fit for small indie and casual devs to move over to without having to learn a completely new workflow. If Godot hadn’t been around I don’t know where everyone would’ve migrated to.
I’d argue Unity’s implosion was wholly evitable. All they had to do was announce, going forward, there would be different licensing. Big new version six months from now? Hey guess what, we’ll do things differently from then on, so make your preparations accordingly. But no - they fucked over existing projects. They tried to retroactively interfere with the business decisions of games that were years into development.
Oracle only gets away with that shit because they’re an eight-ton gorilla. And people still desperately look for the exits every time Larry Ellison announces a relicensing scheme based on how many computers you can think of.
Glad to see there are some level heads leading this project. Also great answer to how to pronounce it, the GIF creator should’ve gone for that instead of the pun.
Yeah except it’s named after the play so it’s definitely pronounced God-oh. I think people just mispronounce it Go-dot if they haven’t heard of the play. Looking at you Mr Linus Tips.
From the article linked on this very post:
Those open source values even extend to how you pronounce the engine’s name. We asked if Godot is pronounced “Go-dough,” like the play, or “Go-dot.”
“It’s open source,” Verschelde said with a grin. “Pronounce it however you like.”
They’re being diplomatic. From Wikipedia:
The name “Godot” was chosen due to its relation to Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but never will.
“Go-dough,” like the play
“Like the play” - but where does the stress go? On the final syllable, as in French? (The play was originally written in French.) On the first syllable, as is more usual in British pronunciation of French words? (The author was Irish and apparently this is how he pronounced it - when speaking English.)
juː ʃʊd juːz ˌɪntəˈnæʃᵊnᵊl fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈælfəbɛt fɔː prəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃᵊn ðɛn
text
You should use international phonetic alphabet for pronunciation then
relevant xkcd
Unity was one of the first applications that made me take a good look at FOSS in general because my experience with it was:
“Hey let’s make a game for our final project”
“Okay, let’s try Unity”
Flashbanged in light mode
Dark Mode is only available for real cash money subscription license
“Yeah okay nvm let’s try something open source lol”
They really paywalled dark mode? That move alone is incredibly dumb. Surefire way to alienate potential new users before they’ve even tested anything serious.
Used to. It took a single registry tweak to enable it which was easily found, but still a pain.
I’m building something heavily reliant on the physics engine. Unity you need to be an enterprise member for the ability to override methods related to physics. Easy choice
Is that why so many unity games have the same feel? I’ve started looking into the game engine that’s used and avoiding unity games.
I can’t say thats why, regardless of engine you’re trying to solve basically the same problems, more likely which example project is used as a starter, which I’m sure very much the same can happen regardless of game engine.
With the FOSS spirit however Im sure more contributors will make plenty of viable starter asset packs for inexperienced users and diversify the “feel”
But I can say being able to actually interact with the phys engine is practically what’s enabling my project, so I would imagine that also has a part in the feel of games
Joe-Dot
I’ve been with unity since the early days and back then it was this simple little engine.
Today it’s a nightmare. I just made an hdr project and imported their own terrain example assets and guess what? It’s broken in multiple ways. Now I have to waste time fixing it, instead of focusing on my project. And that’s as a unity expert rather than a beginner.
That’s not to mention all the errors it loves to throw at me, even though it’s all quite vanilla. And how it loves to grab my attention with popup windows that block my view. How builds fail when I focus on another window. I could go on.
They keep adding features without finishing them. Clearly some kind of impulsive marketing behavior, rather than listening to the experts.
The cherry on top is that licensing nonsense they pulled, putting my hard earned livelihood in danger. That stuff really makes you scratch your head and look around.
Seriously, try out Godot.
Edit: I actually just realized I haven’t even started yet with truly getting stuff off my chest here.
Okay one thing that bothers me so much is how hard it is to hook custom logic into the play button. Like all I want is my own script to run when someone presses play.
Sometimes this is important because you need to do some processing on the scene. Or perhaps the scene is a UI scene or something and you just want to start from another scene that shows the UI at work.
Like if you are developing a UI, you just wanna press play and it should just work and play. Either from the start scene or a test scene.
That’s the weird thing about unity. On one hand it allows you to do a lot of editor customization, and I haven’t worked on a project yet that doesn’t have some form of that. On the other hand, you can’t even hook into or replace the play button logic, which you could argue is the most basic action of all.
Another thing is that a client I am working for just switched to unity’s version management. And it just doesn’t work in a straight forward way. I still don’t have that working because I need to work and get stuff done.
Another thing is that their new animation system didn’t even allow me to query the duration of an animation, at least back when it came out and kept marketing with it. We actually ended up writing an entirely parallel system with meta data which was overly complicated for what we needed.
I could go on…
