[cptcobalt]

I've been part of shipping one of perhaps the largest used Godot projects in production. It's not a game, and you may not even realize it's Godot. Godot is below average in quality compared to Unreal, and probably about on par with various idiosyncrasies that Unity has.

Unreal is winning the technical race because they ship projects and games themselves with their engine. Unity does none of that, at least nothing that counts. Godot is a bit better than Unity because it's open-source so contributors are often contributing to things they use and want to improve, but it's still got weird opinions at a maintainer level and severe performance downfalls from those opinions.

We're considering another renderer, but for the time being we're still tepidly okay with Godot.

[TillE]

It's totally bizarre to compare Unreal Engine with Godot. One is a AAA 3D game engine with awful support for 2D games, the other is a superb 2D game engine with modest 3D capabilities.

There's just very little overlap in sensible use cases, they barely even count as competitors.

[welshwelsh]

Godot allows for very quick development compared to Unreal. The learning curve is shallower and the developer experience is much better.

Unreal, of course, has more features and is more powerful.

Choosing Godot means you are more likely to actually finish making the game. Choosing Unreal means you can potentially make a better game. For me, that's a tough choice, and I often have trouble deciding between one and the other (for 3d games)

[zlsa]

It's not a direct comparison, but there are definitely many games that could be feasibly built in any one of Godot, Unity, or Unreal. There's a lot more to consider beyond just the engine features, such as the asset pipeline, the tooling ecosystem, and the availability of third-party assets and scripts.

[pizza234]

> It's totally bizarre to compare Unreal Engine with Godot. One is a AAA 3D game engine with awful support for 2D games, the other is a superb 2D game engine with modest 3D capabilities.

There is a vocal amount of people (can't say whether they're a minority or not) that tout/desire the major open source engines to be a valid replacement to the commercial ones. This is also happening in Rust, where Bevy is extremely hyped.

So, while it's absolutely true that comparisons don't make much sense, practically, there is a lot of talk about such comparison, so it does make much sense to make this very clear, at least in order to inform developers.

[fezfight]

It's small enough of a code base that you can change things to suit your needs, too. Godot is definitely going to win the race long term, just like blender. People can use whatever they like, of course, but if you want future developer talent, youre going to need to use Godot.

[sk0g]

That's a very bold statement, what has Godot done to warrant it?

It's not even the most advanced open source 3D engine right now, considering O3DE (a fork of CryEngine) is open and backed by a fair few big players.

[TeaDude]

O3DE requires "40-100 GB of free disk space" and a separate compiler.

Godot (3.5) on the other hand requires a paltry 72.6 MB. Even less if you go for older versions or recompile it without certain features. It comes fully featured with it's own scripting language (or C# if you prefer but that requires extra disk space) and pre compiled builds for distribution with the final product. You can still use C++ if you wish however I've personally never needed to.

Godot may not be the biggest and flashiest engine out there but I find that it uses what it has got very effectively. It's extremely easy for newcomers to set-up (Just click the executable and you're all set. It even has it's own IDE.) and comes pre-packaged with the majority of features that your average developer will need.

For comparison, I'd say that it's the game engine equivalent of "QBE" or "tcc" to O3DE's "LLVM". It packs most of the punch of the latter in a neat little package.

[sk0g]

But I was responding to claims that it will be ubiquitous in the industry, not that it's easy to get started with.

> pre-packaged with the majority of features that your average developer will need

From my minimal experience with it, I'd disagree. What's the biggest (3D) game built with Godot?

[TeaDude]

My point is that an engine with easy onboarding and relevant functionality would address most developers' requirements and likely earn it a place in many companies' toolboxes but to address your second point, off the top of my head I believe that game would be the Sonic Colors remake.

There were certainly teething problems with the Switch version but I definitely think it's a good sign when people contracting for a company as big as SEGA are using it.

In that vein however, I ask this: O3DE is a fork of the Amazon Lumberyard engine. Amazon Lumberyard has not been very successful with only a handful of companies using it, mostly Cloud Imperium and Amazon themselves. How do you forsee O3DE changing this pattern?

[sk0g]

Godot does not have relevant functionality though, out of the box, 3.X version are missing many features which prevent it from being easily considered for a major 3D game. I can see it being picked up at even AAAs for prototyping yes, but for full production, not in its current state no.

Sure, Sonic Colors is a decently sized game, but it's really the only notable one (in commercial terms), and a recent release. This is for an engine that is nearing 8 years old.

O3DE is a fork of Lumberyard, but Lumberyard was itself a fork of CryEngine, which should need no introduction. It actually already has a game using it too, listed on Steam - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1142050/Deadhaus_Sonata/ Lumberyard was used mostly for internal projects, but that's because it wasn't meant to be generally available. Amazon is still backing O3DE with many full time engineers, while having notable partners, some of them big game development studios or tools, suggesting unannounced projects are picking up the engine too.

Now, as to why I believe O3DE will succeed - it's got AAA roots, but it's also being rapidly reinvented, while being steered by ongoing in-house projects. The value of major projects being undertaken in-house can not be understated - Unity praised their first big project for providing immense amounts of feedback (and promptly fired the team later...) Amazon can simply afford to throw money at O3DE till it's competitive, while Godot targets a less lucrative demographic.

Look, if Godot 4 turns out to be amazing and competes with Unity and Unreal while being super user friendly, I will be over the moon. Maybe I'll have to re-learn a bit of game development, but that's no biggie. For now, I've tried Unity, then Godot, and then Unreal, and Unreal was the first one that felt feature complete, at the cost of some user friendliness. If I were to run around implementing basic things like I had to with Godot, I would maybe get a game done in a decade or two. I'm trying to maximise the efficiency of my labours being conscious of the limited earth time we all get.

[mackatap]

Usability. For artists and non professional programmers, those options are fairly inaccessible.

[sk0g]

Is it usable because it's... usable, or is it usable because it's barebones? It can be hard to tell the difference when it's pretty far from feature parity with the competition.

FWIW, I don't think cornering the non-professional developer market will lead to market dominance. GameMaker is even simpler, and even if it were open source, hobby developers will not be competing technically against thousands of full time, professional engineers working on an engine.

[seba_dos1]

How relevant O3DE is in practice though?

[sk0g]

More relevant than Godot was at a similar age. Just look at the partners, for example. If the engine picks up steam, could easily see it becoming huge - at least as a base for in-house forks for studios.

https://www.o3de.org/

[seba_dos1]

Partner list doesn't indicate any kind of relevance, and Godot's history is very different, so you're comparing apples to oranges. How many teams are using O3DE to build stuff? How healthy is the user community? How hard is it to find outsourcing and porting houses that work with O3DE? Learning resorces? Extension and asset market? Do you personally know anyone who works in it? Those are all things that Godot does reasonably well these days, while I don't know the answers for O3DE without actively searching for them despite of being in the industry for years and knowing about O3DE since its announcement, hence my question.

O3DE was a code drop that needed to pick up steam almost from scratch, while Godot has already acquired it over years. Also, they're not exactly targeting the same market segment, O3DE being more of an Unreal Engine-wannabe, which is much more challenging. I wish it well, but it doesn't seem like it's anywhere near "relevant" just yet. It's more like a last chance given to Lumberyard to not fall into total obscurity.

[sk0g]

Please re-read the context of the conversation you're replying to - if Godot is not targeting the same market as Unreal, then you're agreeing with my point, not disagreeing. I'll recap anyway.

> Unreal is winning the technical race because they ship projects and games themselves with their engine.

> Godot is definitely going to win the race long term

> what has Godot done to warrant it?

---

It's been open source for around a year. It doesn't take a genius to figure out it's not ready for prime-time, and does not have a community built around it yet. You're also dodging the question of what the biggest game built in Godot was, considering Godot has been around for so much longer.

Deadhaus Sonata is using O3DE, and already looks bigger than any game on the Godot showcase page.

> O3DE was a code drop

With mostly Amazon working on it currently, it's got around the same LoC changes being made to it currently. There's others working on it too, and as more games start using this engine (announced just over a year ago, mind you), the contributors will increase. Games take a long time to even announce - a few years after the start of the project is the typical time-frame. This excludes indie games that Godot typically targets of course.

[jayd16]

How is Unreal on mobile and VR these days? The new UE5 tech doesn't seem to run on it. I can't really speak from experience but it always felt like mobile dev was a much higher priority for Unity than Unreal. Is that still the case?

[spywaregorilla]

It works for mobile. Likely not one of the primary use cases though.

VR support is there. Again, I think not the engine's priority. Last I checked some of their new core tech behind ue5 (lumen, nanite) didn't work correctly in VR, though that was around launch time. I would probably start a new VR project in Unreal, and Godot for mobile.

edit: the RE4 VR remake was in Unreal for example

[naet]

Can I ask what it is you're using godot for if it isn't a game?

[barnabask]

Not OP but educated guess: Tesla's mobile app. https://twitter.com/AlexGuichet/status/1528149807709048833

[cptcobalt]

You’d be right, and we’re hiring to invest more in 3D visualizations in the app. https://twitter.com/alexguichet/status/1549492941202137088?s...

[cercatrova]

Interesting. What do you think of Flutter? It's in a similar space of building mobile apps, not sure how well visualizations work in Flutter though.

[fezfight]

You can build really fancy UIs in it so you can use it for basically anything.

[httpsterio]

what's the lowest hardware requirements you would say you could run a Godot built UI on (not necessarily your product, just generally?)

[sprkwd]

Think folks have used in on a Raspberry Pi

[moffkalast]

Godot doesn't really export for ARM though, are you sure?

[seba_dos1]

There's absolutely no problem to run Godot on ARM (or other architectures). I can run the whole editor on my phone. It's even in Debian repos.

[fezfight]

Is that so? Well there you go, something for me to contribute!

[sli]

It's probably worth mentioning that the Godot Editor itself uses the Godot engine.

[coppolaemilio]

Hey, I'm curious to know what are some of those "weird opinions at a maintainer level". I would love to know more about your experience using it at such scale.