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Godot Game Engine Released Under MIT License
goruka writes with news that a new game engine has been made available to Free Software developers under the permissive MIT license "Godot is a fully featured, open source, MIT licensed, game engine. It focuses on having great tools, and a visual oriented workflow that can deploy to PC, Mobile and Web platforms with no hassle. The editor, language and APIs are feature rich, yet simple to learn. Godot was born as an in-house engine, and was used to publish several work-for-hire commercial titles. With more than half a million lines of code, Godot is one of the most complex Open Source game engines at the moment, and one of the largest commitments to open source software in recent years. It allows developers to make games under Linux (and other unix variants), Windows and OSX."
The source is available via Github, and, according to Phoronix, it's about as featureful as the Unity engine.
(Sorry)
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The AC actually brings up a good point ! Whatever happened to CrystalSpace, Orge3D and other 3D game engines?
The only one I hear about these days is the FPS "Cube" and "Cube 2: Sauerbraten"
* http://cubeengine.com/
* http://sauerbraten.org/
This is an easy answer, STL is good but often not as good, specially for projects this size and requirements because:
1- It generates huge debugging symbols.
2- It generates a lot of code because most compilers inline it by default.
3- It's so complex that compile time increases by a few times.
4- Errors are huge and uncomprehensible.
5- Support for custom allocators is limited to alloc/dealloc functions.
6- Support across compilers is not as good (specially console compilers).
7- Lack of support for COW with atomic ops for thread safety
Some of these probably improved significantly since the time work on the engine started, but I'm sure most issues still stand.
As for why not std::string or std::wstring, have you actually used those? They suck, the amount of operations you can do is really little, check core/ustring.h in Godot to std::string and you'll easily see why everyone rewrites the string class.
They still exist, but are often used for student projects and tech demos. Building the game engine and the associated tech demos to show it off is the (relatively) easy part. Creating a decent game with proper art assets, animation, music, voice actors, level design and a good storyline with well-developed characters is the hard part. It requires a lot more effort than collaboratively building application middleware and many studios prefer to use proven commercial engines like UE, iD tech, CryEngine, Source, etc... that are artifacts of actually building a commercial game rather than building just an engine.
I'm not saying these things are essential for all games but often for notable ones and in the case of simple games it is often not worth the effort to learn/use an engine that has so many features you aren't going to need.
Thos are 3d engines, not full fame engines.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Does a fame engine do anything useful outside SEO? I don't want to be famous on just the internet you know. Sure, the internet has a very large demographics, and it's international, but everything feels so virtual. And being "virtually famous" doesn't make me look good.
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
The first thing I noticed is that the string class wasn't well thought out at all.
In particular, while it is already generally considered among experienced C++ programmers to be unsafe to derive a class from another that does not have a virtual destructor (a rule that the godot author(s) seem to have violated by inheriting their custom string class from their vector class), when the base class does not contain any virtual members at all, and the base class is still intended to be a general utility class, then inheritance is almost always the wrong tool for the job. The proper tool, in this case, would probably have been to use containment, and not inheritance... or if inheritance was really to have been the way to go, then it should have been derived from a base class that was common to both itself and Vector, where the necessary base class is never directly used by anyone other than those classes, (with all of its constructors declared protected, including the copy constructor, so that it is not possible to use the class unsafely outside of those controlled contexts).
I can think of absolutely no good reason to ever inherit from a class that has absolutely no virtual functions when the base class is one of general utility, and may be utilized by callers.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I believe it's because their women lack estragon during development...
$
From the article:
Phoronix was just repeating the developer's claim. Would anybody who isn't the engine's developer care to comment on its feature parity with Unity?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
None of those are nearly as complex or featured as Godot.
After having a look over the doco for Godot, I'd say that CrystalSpace isn't as far behind as you'd think (especially if you include CEL). However, Godot seems to have more nice features if you're actually developing a game (nice UI, publishing integration).
CS suffers from being more of a programmer's playground than a practical game engine and having quite a steep learning curve, but I've been toying with it for more than a decade.
Also, they were designed for hardware architectures not relevant any more today.
This hits closer to the mark - CS was started a long time ago, but it's ended up being well designed and modular. However, it's difficult to pick up new talent to implement new stuff with such a large existing codebase, leading to quite a bit of development inertia in certain areas.
Still, it works with modern OpenGL and console ports have been made.
I'm more interested in how Godot stacks up against a framework like Marmalade.
You've never played Star Wars: The Old Republic, have you. The majority of the problems they've had with development has been wrangling their 3rd party game engine to fit their game concept.
The art & the story are hard to do, but picking the right game engine can make or break your game as well.
Well that ruins it. I wanted my game to have a totally awesome secret cow level.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling