[churnedgodotdev]

After quickly falling in love with Godot and several months of serious use I'm having to give up on it due to Godot's lack of funding to fix its more than 6000 open issues on Github:

  https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues

Every single time a Godot bug bites me I find that a bunch of other devs reported the issue more than a year ago but no one has had time/money to fix the issue. For example, I was just bitten by #45628 opened Feb 1, 2021:

  https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/45628

When implementing controller support for a top-down Zelda-like game, it's normal to allow either the d-pad or left analog stick to control direction. But if you enable both at the same time in Godot then d-pad inputs cause your character to "freeze".

Eventually Godot will stabilize and be to game engines what Blender currently is to 3D modelers. If I had time to learn the Godot C++ code I would volunteer to help but I want to actually make video games instead of working on an engine.

[TillE]

I found and fixed a small Godot bug, starting from zero knowledge of the engine code, in about a day and a half free time. It's really not hard to just patch stuff yourself if you're comfortable with C++.

Godot is not beautiful modern code or anything, but it's definitely not inscrutable layers of spaghetti which require deep expertise. It's very readable and compiles reasonably fast.

[herewulf]

Out of curiosity, are you funding it?

I've been funding it (a small amount monthly) for a long time now. I wish it had existed about 15 years ago in college when I had lots of time on my hands for toying with game making.

[churnedgodotdev]

I'd fund it if I could use it to actually ship something and make money. I've donated to other software projects. If, say, for several thousand bucks they'd actually give me a tiny bit of support by fixing bugs in the "stable" branch that affect me then I'd pay up. At this point though if I want to actually ship using open source I find I can actually get things done faster using SDL2. Because SDL2 is a minimal layer over native if there is an issue I can actually figure out what native calls are happening in what order. If controller inputs are wonky or textures are the wrong color I can figure out why. Godot does try to use an understandability friendly subset of C++ (no template metaprogramming and such) but it is still too sophisticated for me to quickly dive in and understand how it all works; and it is certainly too complicated for its core maintainers to be able to quickly dive in and fix longstanding open issues in "stable".