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by ryan_n 31 days ago
> To gain Godot's level of indie marketshare, a single breakout engine project that embraces vibecoding could be enough.

What are you basing this off of? There are already plenty of game engine projects like what you describe here. Doesn't seem to have affected Godot thus far, unless I'm missing something.
1 comments
maiybe 31 days ago
That's basically the same argument Unity made a few years ago.

There isn't, until there is. These things take time. The tech has to be adopted, the people have to integrate into game jams, indies percolate. Godot is young, my predictions are 3-5 years.

Regarding competition though, the question is about the unique selling points of Godot that would be hard to replicate. Before AI coding, there is a _lot of momentum_ for leaders in the game engine world. Everyone specializes and it takes many years of game cycles to make the switch to a new engine. Not anymore!

So we have yet to see a dog-eat-dog game engine world, and in that world, ejecting AI-coding could in fact be a net negative. That's what I am arguing at least.

Regarding the unique selling points of the engine: 1. Open-source 2. Node/Scene encapsulation design: Big! - Easily my favorite part of GDScript. Easy to replicate. 3. Scripting languages: GDScript, buggy C# - AI-coding doesn't care what language as long as it's popular

My suspicion: A competitor could use a known compiled language (Rust) and a scripting language (luau) and get the same mileage as Godot and replace every one of their selling points with more performant code. Because they waited so long to deploy a marketplace, they have very little sticky bits to their market share.

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roflcopter69 29 days ago
A serious competitor wouldn't use Rust because it immediately disqualifies your engine from being shipped to consoles. At least at the moment. I know it's less of a technical limitation and more of a political one, but if you are serious about shipping your game to various platforms, you cannot use Rust. But things might be about to change, see https://akaganite.com

But honestly, as of today, you're probably having a better time taking a few days to work out clean C++23 guidelines for your AI agents by letting them churn through all the changes and deprecations that happened to C++ over the years, figure out good clang-tidy and clang-format rules, turn on all the compiler warnings and tell them to regularly use UBSAN, ASAN and TSAN and you're getting really close to a clean workflow similar to what Rust would give you but with the rich platform support of C++. It's just kinda sad that one has to go through so much ceremony while the Rust ecosystem gives you those things for free. But imo a well-crafted AI agent workflow gets really close here.

Mean edit: I was reading more of your comments in this post and I start to think you're a bit of bullshitter who's quite overconfident because you think AI makes you so much more productive. I say this because any seasoned game engine dev wouldn't have suggested Rust for a game engine that is supposed to compete with Godot, Unity, Unreal or whatever due to missing consoles support, but you just did, which makes me suspect that you have really shallow understanding and really, AI won't help here. You could have at least mentioned that if you only target dektop and mobile then Rust is a good choice, but you didn't. But don't get me wrong, I'm quite AI pilled as well, but I still know that some things require expert knowledge to properly steer the AI agents.

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