[lazypenguin]

Congratulations to the Godot team for reaching this milestone. As someone who leads a team working on a game project using an old, custom engine we have a quiet desire to switch to a different engine. There is a temptation to consider investing in Godot over one of the other tried and true engines due to its leanness and open source nature but still feels like a gamble for a 3D project. I wish there were more people talking about their experience with Godot beyond a hobby level.

[lynndotpy]

I used Godot 2 a few years back to make a demo of an (interactive, non-videogame) system when interning for a government contractor.

They loved the demo, but management felt uneasy about moving forward with an open-source engine with no support guarantees.

So they decided to go with a proprietary commercial game engine with a license compatible with our work.

All I know now is that proprietary engine is dead now and Godot isn't.

[cptcobalt]

> As someone who leads a team working on a game project using an old, custom engine we have a quiet desire to switch to a different engine.

Curious about the reasoning behind this? Has your engine had good technical leadership, or is it tacked together based on need? (If I were starting a studio today, I'd strongly prefer build an engine for our teams from the ground up, but that's certainly counter to the intuition of most, and likely inadvisable.)

As a builder on the team of one of the largest deployed Godot projects, it is certainly effective and I'm incredibly glad exists—I am very happy to use it, but it's not without its pain points. I rate it significantly better than Unity, a fair bit worse than Unreal (but ), open source is a major benefit (we have our own modifications), and there are some peculiar maintainer/code/project decisions...but we can deal with it. All that said, we'll probably never be able to upgrade to Godot 4, but Godot 4 looks damn good.

[lazypenguin]

Ultimately we probably won’t switch but our game runs on a 20 year old engine that has had no updates in all that time. Directx9, no pixel shaders, poor performance, custom formats, windows only and no interoperability with modern formats. We don’t have any graphics or engine specialists on the team so upgrades on that front are challenging. However all of these can be overcome the biggest enticement is the editor platform. Our current tooling system is dire and making good tooling is such a time sink. Being able to build tools within another platform is inticing while also getting other advantages such as cross platform deploy, asset imports, UI framework, etc. is tempting. The grass is always greener!

[TheMagicHorsey]

I feel the same way. Godot has made amazing progress ... both in the engine and in the community. But it's still "very early" in terms of adoption for big commercial teams. Having said that, depending on the genre of game your team is making, it could very well be a good choice. Perhaps not for a AAA 3D title ... but for other genres where having cutting edge visuals isn't the most relevant part of the content.

I for one am hoping there's a Rust-based engine on the horizon in the next 5 years (Bevy perhaps?)

[badsectoracula]

> As someone who leads a team working on a game project using an old, custom engine we have a quiet desire to switch to a different engine

I'd be careful with this and make sure that if you do try a switch, you'd keep the existing tech alive. I've worked on a bunch of game projects in different companies and in pretty much every single one of them, both custom and external engines, people wanted to use something else.

One of my favorite jokes was that the biggest feature UE brings is that you get to blame Tim Sweeney when something goes wrong instead of the engine CTO :-P.