[jay_kyburz]

Juan made it very clear in a follow up tweet that Sega would have had to have made significant changes to the engine in order to ship a game on it.

I spent three months working in Godot a few years ago and it was clear even then that there were significant bugs in major systems. If you want to ship on Godot you had better be prepared to roll up your sleeves and dive right down deep into the engine.

This is one of the few bugs I logged before finally giving up on the engine.

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/32383#issuecomme...

The object pooling system reuses references so that your script can't tell when a reference to an object it is holding, changes. They doubled down on the bug by making the behavior in Debug different to a Release build. It's marked closed, but users still report it happening.

[kevingadd]

Aside from whether this should be fixed, that's a classical problem not unique to godot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem

The real problem is that you are not properly managing the lifetime of your objects so you have dangling references. Obviously Godot could provide better tooling to help you identify and troubleshoot it, but dangling references like that will cause breakage in basically any runtime environment that makes it possible to have them.

IDs of that sort can be reused in many environments. For example, if you use Unity, .NET GCHandle IDs can be reused in the exact same way.

[jay_kyburz]

Sure, there are easy workarounds, but the issues are unexpected and secret (and now only in release). In any other scripting language I've worked on you can do some test on a reference to see if its null or doesn't exist. In Godot you have to listen for the object reference leaving the scene.

I can guarantee this is not an issue in Unity where a object that has been removed from the scene is null.

[kevingadd]

As it happens, Unity has its own version of this problem, where it pretends that a non-null dangling reference is a null-reference: https://jacx.net/2015/11/20/dont-use-equals-null-on-unity-ob...

[jay_kyburz]

That is not the same at all. The equivalent would be that your reference is pointing to some other object in the scene.

[thaumasiotes]

> In any other scripting language I've worked on you can do some test on a reference to see if its null or doesn't exist.

Except - and this is called out in the github thread - the reference is not null and does exist. The check is working correctly.

The problem lies in the fact that what you want to check for is "is the object I originally pointed to still around?", but instead of doing that, you're checking "is the thing I'm pointing to currently a valid object?".

[jay_kyburz]

Yes, but read further, there is no method to test whether the object I pointed to still exists. You have to listen for a signal that the object is leaving the scene and manually clear your reference.

[nightowl_games]

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_%40gdsc...

I'm making a complex Godot game.

'is_instance_valid' does what you are describing.

[jay_kyburz]

Only in Debug builds. If you rely on it in a release build you will crash.

https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1589 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/41179

Reduz doesn't want the fix in release builds because the will be slower!

[thaumasiotes]

> there is no method to test whether the object I pointed to still exists

There probably is such a method, but you'd have to invoke it on the object, not on some other unrelated object.

[Arech]

One of the funniest moments I've experienced with Godot while developing the FitOwl [1] was the behaviour of a flag that governs sleeping state of RigidBodies. That flag was meant to exclude the body from physics-related computations to save some CPU-cycles and it just didn't work.

When I reported the issue to the bugtracker, I was asked by devs literally "I still don't understand the issue you're experiencing. Aside from saving resources, why is it important that Rigidbodys are asleep?"... I was (and still is) speechless from that attitude, because, c`mon guys, the sole reason for that flag is to save some resources! But they didn't really cared about that, just reworded the docs a little and happily closed the issue.

Moreover, I got an email from one of the Devs stating that I'm violating their Code of Conduct for the phrase "I'm struggling to not interpret your comment as a joke.".

That was the last time I tried to take part in Godot improvement...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402743

[dkersten]

My experience back in 2018 was similar. I wanted to do some fairly simple 2D things and it was quite a lot of hassle. I’m sure the issues I hit are fixed now, but at the time it was frustrating.

With that said, I’m still happy to have contributed a little bit of code to gdnative. Nothing exciting, just some quality of life stuff I wanted at the time (a few variadic template wrapper functions around the C api to avoid having to manually construct godot list objects of parameters). Last I checked it was still in use, although moved to a different file.