Waiting for 4.0

February 8, 2022 12:18 PM

For Doubles Jubilee, let's take another look at Godot, a compact, lightweight, yet really capable game development system. It runs on, and can make games for, many platforms! It's approaching a 4.0 release! It's gotten much better in the nearly two years since I first posted it, and had a burst of popularity spurred on by Unity's recent pushing of people towards upgrading to Pro. There are now many YouTube resources to help people learn it. For people who learn best through text, there's also the official documentation and their tutorial page. (Previously, in 2020)
posted by JHarris (15 comments total)

And I just want to say that I really like Doubles Jubilee month! I like taking the excuse to go back through my old posts and revisit them. I hope this becomes a recurring thing.
posted by JHarris at 12:19 PM on February 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I really like Godot! Its extensibility and the fact that it's fully open make it a really great choice for programming tasks for behavioral research. I was able to get it to play nicely with a high-end optical eye tracking system without too much trouble, and talk to my custom Arduino-based device for controlling other research hardware. Unity is starting to get fairly popular among researchers for complex behavioral tasks, but I think Godot is actually a better choice.
posted by biogeo at 12:26 PM on February 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

It does have some important limitations for behavioral-research-task-purposes, but it seems like some of those are probably going to be improved significantly with the 4.0 release.
posted by biogeo at 12:28 PM on February 8, 2022

All these nice new game engines are really highlighting the fact that I can’t do 3d modeling.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:46 PM on February 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I don't believe that you can't do 3d modeling, merely that you have not yet learned. Blender is wild these days and have entire workflows for making 3d art that don't require any artistic talent or instinct.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:14 PM on February 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

For blender check out Imphenzia on YouTube. He does these 10 minute challenges that are pretty neat. He does mostly low-poly game assets and sometimes makes whole games. I dunno how his particular workflow applies to the higher end art stuff that blender can do, but if you were going to try to make a game with Godot, it's kind of perfect.
posted by Horkus at 1:37 PM on February 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Ha! Looked at the site (and others) only the other day, whilst doing my traditional annual wishy-washy "I should get a working dev environment up in advance and unrustify (deoxidise?) my programming chops so I can finally try making a 7DRL this year". Will download and give it a proper poke. Cheers for the impetus, even if likely nothing comes of it!
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 8:57 PM on February 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Another nice thing about Godot, is it's more or less a complete dev environment if you want to stick within it. You can use other tools, but Godot provides you with pretty much everything you need.
posted by biogeo at 8:15 AM on February 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Godot is written using itself! And there's a "tool" mode that gives you direct filesystem access and can be used for more general computing! It can be run out of its download, not needing to be installed even! And it's still less than 40MB in all!
posted by JHarris at 1:25 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

So:

a) This is great.

b) This is really great.

It's so great that even though the editor is reliably but randomly crashing on me about once an hour, I am nevertheless continuing to work through the tutorial.

I have some kind of graphics driver issue related to onboard Intel graphics stuff: if you too are using a Lenovo laptop with similarly obscure Intel graphics hardware, apparently not properly supported on any known OS (not just a Linux issue this, Windows users have it too, who knew that Intel graphics cards / drivers were designed on YOLO principles), you too may run into the same problem.

Haven't found a proper solution yet, and it's only hung the entire machine two or three times. Sometimes it comes back by itself. Sometimes I need to kill the process and restart. Or reboot. YOLO.

I'm that into it that I am ok with this. Ok, not ok as such, but working around it.

c) Just discovered that the tutorial seems to be out of sync enough with the latest version of Godot such that when you get to the bit in My First 2D Game section where you implement the HUD display you need to go off and research the way they have changed how fonts are selected between the time the tutorial was written and the more recent updates by yourself. That's because the method described to add fonts no longer exists, and the font files provided are no longer recognised as fonts.

This is extremely annoying. But I will do it.

In a bit.

*catches breath*

*cries*

You didn't think this would be straightforward, did you?

Wait, no, I've found it.

Instead of selecting 'Custom Fonts', which no longer exists, you have to select 'Theme Overrides / Fonts', and then from *there* (not Theme Overrides) load your provided .ttf font and set size to 64. I don't think you can copy this across to other nodes any more, but I could be wrong. What do I know? I'm just trying to follow the tutorial.

And I'm really into it.
posted by motty at 4:19 PM on February 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yay! I'm glad it works for you! I also have a Lenovo with Intel integrated graphics and haven't had crashes, but I also have a dedicated AMD graphics chip.

I really think Godot is the future of indie game development.
posted by JHarris at 4:37 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

As far as I can tell, Godot is well-placed to overtake Unity in the next five or so years as the engine of choice for hobbyists and independent developers. Like Unity, you can ship Real games in it, without the issues that other accessible engines like Construct 2 or Game Maker have when you try to scale up to something substantial. Unity has made itself increasingly unattractive by deprecating important components without a robust system to replace them; Godot at the moment doesn't have the wide variety of assets available for Unity, but as Godot gets more popular, I'm sure that'll change.
posted by Merus at 11:26 PM on February 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ooh, this seems like fun. I'm always like "I should make a simple game", but I usually get stuck at the "pick a game engine" part of it.
posted by Harald74 at 5:05 AM on February 10, 2022

Crashosity update: I worked through the My First 2D Game tutorial last night following my post above. It was doable but did continually require restarts from crashing out.

Tonight I'm now halfway through My First 3D Game tutorial, and it hasn't crashed once!

My First 3D Game also asks you to begin by importing a skeleton project instead of starting from scratch. This import has set the graphics mode to GLES2, rather than GLES3 as it was yesterday.

So, if you find it runs unstably, as I did, maybe try setting GLES2 instead of GLES3, if (hoping) that's a thing you can do mid-er-thing. Very much enjoying this 'not crashing randomly' business.

Thanks, JHarris!
posted by motty at 4:37 PM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Glad that worked, motty! I think the GLES2/3 thing is going to be removed in Godot 4.0 with its improved graphics backend, so hopefully it won't be an issue for you for too much longer.
posted by biogeo at 8:06 PM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]