this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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You have no idea what you're talking about my guy. First off, Godot has been in development since 2007. That's 16 years ago. Secondly, Godot started in Codenix, a consulting company that made money by licensing then-closed-source Godot. They only made it open source in 2014 - 7 years into development. This is a company that made its money through selling a game engine, not through making games. Thirdly, Godot receives funding from massive companies (e.g. they received $250k in funding from Epic Games in 2020). Fourthly, Godot is not up to par with Unreal Engine or Unity. It's NOT a viable game engine for many games being developed.
Edit: also, I'm not a milennial. I'm a zoomer. No, I'm not too young to have an opinion on this, I've been making games for 15 years.
You're not wrong that creating FOSS technologies is a worthwhile pursuit. I think what you're missing is how massive a game engine is. The average game development company simply cannot be creating its own engine or forking Godot to create a game in.
It requires a large company dedicated to engine development and tooling, and at least a decade of development, to create a worthwhile engine. If you want to make a game, fronting that development with a decade of engine development is not financially sensible. This issue is not one that game development companies can fix.
That said, if Godot meets your game and team's needs (or reasonably close to where you can reasonably develop the engine further to meet them), go for it. But it's not realistic for most developers.
Show us yours.
You're one of the developers of the godot engine?
Can you link your commits please?
I'll take that as a no.
So, how much time have you spent in game engine development?
What I'm hearing is that you actually have zero experience in or knowledge of game engine development, despite telling people to make their own.
Is that correct?
To quote somebody in this thread:
"So get cracking or don't complain."
You're complaining endlessly, so show us what you made.
You sound like you dont know anything about programming (at least engine programming). Most Engines have to run in something like assembly, else they would be too slow. (They use others too but Assembly is in like all, i am a junior dev so i could be wrong)
Assembly is already a large hurdle.
I mean it is "simple" as the arch linux type of "simple". (Nothing more than you need to run it and nothing more)
So the option is to learn assembly or hire someone (or multiple) who can, good luck by finding one that is capable of developing an engine that does not suck and does not cost a fortune.
Then you need to know what the engine should do.
If you "only" need 2D or even only some system to interact with the console you will be fine, maybe.
3D is a bit more complicated, the reason why there are so much 2D/2,5D games out supports this claim.
Then particle support if you want it...
Every feature you want has to be supported!
And every feature costs and maybe needs maintenance when bugs occur. Supporting an operating system is a feature too :)
So the engine has to be updated when a mayor OS update comes out
There are more points for why not to make an own engine and use one of the marked that fits ones needs even if it is closed source.
You where so fond of Godot so trying to help them might be a good starting point for you to life your ideals. I sincerely dont want to mock you with the sentence. If you can successfully help a larger open source project everyone is happy. If you can learn something new i am sure it can benefit you. I was only a bit mad because it felt like you are comparing engines with "weekend projects" what they are definitely not in the slightest.
Assembly usage is pretty minor in these engines. Tends to be for just a few very tight loops. It has to be redone for every platform, too. Assembly for x86-64 doesn't work on ARM. Hell, some things on 32-bit x86 won't even work on x86-64. You would never want to do more than a function of inline ASM here or there. It'd be a nightmare if you did.
That said, it's barely even touching on the complexity of modern engines. Unity and Unreal aren't just engines, they're a whole development ecosystem.
I'd like to jump out of the system for a moment and opine a few things:
And there's a very good reason for that: you are vastly understating how difficult it is to make something on the level of Unity or Unreal, and people here can see it. It's not merely difficult, but completely out of reach for anyone without hundreds of millions of existing revenue. Open source is not going to get you there anytime soon. By the time it could even get to the current level of the big two engines, those two would have already moved on to something even better.
It's not a choice between a corporate licensed engine or an open source one or an in-house one. It's a choice between a corporate engine and having a finished product in any kind of reasonable time frame, or having a finished product that's anything close to modern looking.
Now, I happen to agree with the statement "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding". So if that's what you're getting at, then I agree. But know that this is what you're asking for.
That's a naive way of pretending to be above it all. People downvote for a reason, and it can be useful to think about those reasons. Meanwhile, while complaining that "You’re also not listening to what I’m telling you . . . " while clearly not even bothering to address most of my points.