Godot Engine Reaches 1.0, First Stable Release

goruka writes "Godot, the most advanced open source (MIT licensed) game engine, which was open-sourced back in February, has reached 1.0 (stable). It sports an impressive number of features, and it's the only game engine with visual tools (code editor, scripting, debugger, 3D engine, 2D engine, physics, multi-platform deploy, etc) on a scale comparable to commercial offerings. As a plus, the user interface runs natively on Linux. Godot has amassed a healthy user community (through forums, Facebook and IRC) since it went public, and was used to publish commercial games in the Latin American and European markets such as Ultimo Carnaval with publisher Square Enix, and The Mystery Team by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Comments

Good

[Chrisq]

I've been waiting for it...

Re:Good

[Bob_Who]

Ha! Samuel Beckett would be proud.

Re:Good

[RevWaldo]

The latest build will not be available this evening but surely tomorrow.

.

Re:Good

[synaptik]

Mods, you suck! The PP is a reference to "Waiting for Godot." Get some culture before you down-mod.

Re:Good

[frooddude]

In fact, all my browser is saying right now in the status line is ... "Waiting for www.godotengine.com..."

blargh

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never actually seen this game engine, but I am sure it is excellent.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

He would be if he had not stepped into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanished.

Re:Good

[Em Adespoton]

Ha! Samuel Beckett would be proud.

I figured that with a name like Godot Engine, it was vaporware from the beginning. This kind of ruins Beckett's entire premise!

Re:Good

[Hussman32]

Most of the funny quips were modded up already...

Game Developed

[groovy_daemon]

Don't forget Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy is being made with it. Which just succeeded in it's Kickstarter campaign based on the Latin comic published by Dark Horse. http://okamstudio.com/portfolio-items/dog/

Hacked?

[Anonymous Coward]

As probably noticed, the website was down for most of the year due to hacking. It seems to be in good shape and properly secured now (hopefully)

Maybe I'm being too harsh but this doesn't inspire a lot of confidence...

Re:Hacked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'm going to guess that the Engine People are different than the Website People

Having it down for such a long time reveals other organizational problems though

Impressive

[BlackPignouf]

It's very impressive.
The Godot website reaches 0.01fps right now.

Re:Impressive

[BarbaraHudson]

I had no problem downloading it quuickly yesterday after I saw the story in the firehose. Maybe it doesn't take much to slashdot them?

Re:Impressive

[darkain]

Error 503: Service Unavailable

Re:Impressive

[sconeu]

That's deliberate. You have to wait for it.

I am on board if they have....

[GoodBuddy]

... goat simulator.

Re:I am on board if they have....

[Anonymous Coward]

... goat simulator.

Sadly, There you go

I've been looking for such a solution

[war4peace]

My project would fit really well with this engine, I think. I've been looking for a multiplatform game engine and Godot looks like the Holy Grail.
I'll have to verify how does it fare as a MMO GUI which depends almost completely on connecting to a bigass DB.

Re:I've been looking for such a solution

[Geoffrey.landis]

My project would fit really well with this engine, I think. I've been looking for a multiplatform game engine and Godot looks like the Holy Grail.
I'll have to verify how does it fare as a MMO GUI which depends almost completely on connecting to a bigass DB.

So, you're saying that this is what you've been waiting for?

Re:I've been looking for such a solution

[war4peace]

Ha, I see what you did there.
Seriously though, no, it's just that the project is not yet in the stage where I would actively look for a game engine.

JMonkeyEngine?

[abies]

I'm partially involved with jmonkeyengine, so it is hardly an ubiased opinion, but how do we quantify 'most advanced' and 'visual tools comparable with commercial offerings?'
In particular, where Godot has noticeable difference compared to what JMonkeyEngine offers?
http://jmonkeyengine.org/featu...
Two games given as showcase example - they look ok for indie-level games (regardless of companies behind them, they are indie-quality games at best), but so does for example JME based http://www.desura.com/games/pi.... And any of these is _light years_ away from AAA titles done on commercial engines - because problem is not only with engine, problem is with having millions of dollars to spend on asset creation.

I'm all for healthy competition in open source engines. But touting statements like 'most advanced' and 'only' is not really fair.

Re:JMonkeyEngine?

[goruka]

It's fair. Godot is not written in Java.
Seriously though, I have used JMonkeyEngine and it is sort of hit and miss. Godot architecture, features, platform deploy, animation tools, etc. are a lot more mature, please give it a chance when you have time.

Re:JMonkeyEngine?

[Shinobi]

I'm affiliated with neither toolkit, but I've tested both, and compared with other offerings such as the Unreal, CryEngine and Unity toolkits. Personally, I find Unreal and CryEngine to still be quite a bit ahead of Godot and Unity, and jmonkeyengine FAR behind everyone else. Others will have other opinions, some of them due to ideological fanaticism for example.

Parts of that is because of how well-designed the ability to interface with other code etc is. Godot and Unity still have some hoops you need to jump through, in my opinion.

Another reason is workflow. CryEngine and Unreal Engine still have a pretty well-designed default workflow, that you can still change if you want. Jmonkeyengine suffers from the usual open-source mentality of "oh, you can build everything up from scratch!", which means "you HAVE to build your workflow from scratch"(Incidentally, this is why many open-source toolkits in other fields outside software development and mathematics etc fail to gain traction: The users don't want to have to invest months of effort, or lots of money, to build up an entire workflow. I know my friends who work in GIS have that complaint for example). You also see the same issue with graphics programs etc. Photoshop vs GIMP for example. Proponents of GIMP often argue that "But, you can modify the program!" etc, while Photoshop has been designed, over the years, to have a workflow based on aggregate collected advice from artists all over the world. Blender(*) had to give in and adapt slightly towards a more Maya-style(*) workflow, instead of the old and utter crap in-house workflow designed by programmers for programmers style used at the design studio where it was first written. In light of above, Godot is a step above the usual open source offerings, in that it has a well-defined default workflow, and I find personally that it edges out Unity in that regard too.

* And that's even when factoring in Autodesk crapping on Maya's workflow. Non-3D artists and 3D artists who were not around for the mid to late 90's and early 2000's don't understand just how much of a revolution Maya was when it came out.

Re:JMonkeyEngine?

[Anonymous Coward]

You also see the same issue with graphics programs etc. Photoshop vs GIMP for example. Proponents of GIMP often argue that "But, you can modify the program!" etc, while Photoshop has been designed, over the years, to have a workflow based on aggregate collected advice from artists all over the world.

Gimp isn't the only open source graphics program around, FYI. There are others that take user input seriously and don't shrug off requests or wait years to implement them.

For example, Krita is closer to how you describe Photoshop's development, with the devs getting input from artists and incorporating that into development. Not just unsolicited bug reports and feature requests, either: they post artist interviews on their site occasionally, and they always include "what do you like about Krita?" and "what is Krita missing?" questions in them. Gives the artists some exposure while also helping devs learn what people consider to be Krita's strengths and weaknesses.

MyPaint development is similar, though quieter about it. It used to be very minimal but gained a lot of nice features at the request of illustrators that used the software and asked for improvements.

Blender(*) had to give in and adapt slightly towards a more Maya-style(*) workflow, instead of the old and utter crap in-house workflow designed by programmers for programmers style used at the design studio where it was first written.

I wouldn't really consider that an open source failing either. Some people actually like Blender's original workflow and design, and by the time it got open sourced years later, it had enough of a following that a complete redesign would have pissed off a lot of people. Not just anybody, it would have pissed off the people that liked blender enough to pay €100,000 to have it open sourced. It took a while but I think they came up with a good compromise with the 2.5+ versions. Flexible UI, old workflows still possible, with preset keybindings and layouts to mimic other programs for people that are familiar with something else and not interested in changing anything they don't absolutely have to.

Waiting for the industry study...

[JoeyRox]

that says proprietary, closed-source games are 23% more fun to play and have 45% lower IT maintenance costs.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Stopped reading when I saw the word GDScript. Killed my interest right there. Another game engine using a custom one-off dynamic scripting language nobody else uses and as such will have no good code analysis or other such tools.

Re:Yawn

[tepples]

What well-known dynamic scripting language should it have embedded instead? Lua's standard library assumes use of "tables" (equivalent to a hash/dict) as 1-based null-terminated arrays, which causes programmers who come from other languages (most of which use 0-based bounds-checked arrays) to end up creating programs with unintended incorrect behavior.

Re:Yawn

[wiredlogic]

What well-known dynamic scripting language should it have embedded instead?

You've got Tcl, purpose built for embedding, Jim, lightweight clone of Tcl, Python, Perl, and Ruby. All mature scripting languages that would do the job with 0-based arrays.

Re:Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

You can add more languages to the engine as modules. Someone worked on Lua support, but ran into issues so it's unfinished, but the code is on github. I'd love to see someone add a Perl module. But until then, I'm happy with GDScript.

Re:Yawn

[goruka]

Except the above mentioned have several problems:
-They are dog slow because every indexing is a lookup in a hash table.
-They don't have proper multi-thread support (with ability to share context between threads), this is essential for videogames. They either not support it or have a global lock.
-They do not support vector types natively (Vector2,Vector3,Matrix2,Matrix3,Matrix4,etc) which are also essential to video games (and binding as usretype is really slow)
-Have terrible means of GC, which are also not designed for video games. GCs usually "stop the world" to work, and when they are run incrementally they can leak memory without the user noticing. Even Unity has problems with this with C#.


Why is it so difficult to understand that Godot has created a custom script language to avoid the problems mentioned above, because the "existing languages" everyone suggests are not designed for videogames and real-time?
Is it so important to use an existing language, even at the cost of poorer performance and worse integration?. GDScript also tries to be as similar as possible to Python, to ease the transition.

Re:Yawn

[Shinobi]

Purpose built for embedding does not mean it's suitable for game use.

In fact, all of the examples you mention have serious drawbacks when it comes to using in games. Civ style games sort of forgive the use of Python, in that users are already waiting between turns in end-game, so a second or two extra doesn't matter. But a RTS, a FPS or a simulator, it definitely becomes a hindrance to the gamer, even though it might be convenient for lazy or incompetent programmers.

As another poster mentions, lack of decent multithreading is one such hindrance.

Re:Yawn

[wiredlogic]

Python has array.array built in not to mention the extensive native vector support in NumPy. It's trivial to add high-performance features to existing scripting languages.

Re:Yawn

[aaaaaaargh!]

Why don't they 1-index then? Are they that stupid?

Re:Yawn

[tepples]

Why don't they 1-index then?

Because they forget to, and because all the algorithms and data structures that they learned elsewhere, such as heap priority queues, have to have their logic changed between 0- and 1-indexing and between arrays that do and do not allow nil to be an element. For example, any SQL database will produce NULL values in the result of a LEFT JOIN statement, but in the iterator protocol used by Lua's for statement, nil is the terminator.

Are they that stupid?

Some people would interpret this question as carrying a hidden assumption that even if a language's design is flawed, a programmer can be just as productive in it as in any other language. If you are not trying to imply that, then yes, programmers are fallible, and a language design can help a programmer produce a correct program more quickly by protecting the programmer from his own mistakes. See, for example, widely cited accusations leveled at PHP. But if you are trying to imply that, then why not just have everybody program in assembly language?

In Soviet America, Godot is waiting for you

[Geoffrey.landis]

Seriously though, no, it's just that the project is not yet in the stage where I would actively look for a game engine.

Ah. So Godot has to wait for you.

Torque MIT Licensed and More "advanced"

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe everyone missed this but GarageGames open-sourced under MIT both the Torque3D engine and Torque2D. Both of these engines have active communities. Tons of support. And maybe most important, real published games. It's nice that Godot is at least "stable."

Re:Torque MIT Licensed and More "advanced"

[goruka]

I had the "pleasure" to port Torque3D to PSP, so I know it inside out. Torque is (sorry for the strong words) a pile of shit, it has always been a pile of shit and it will always be it.
It was opensourced because it failed as commercial offering, developers did not want to use it back then and that fact will not change even if you offer them money.

Re:Torque MIT Licensed and More "advanced"

[Shinobi]

To echo the other poster: Torque is so bad that I would not force enemy combatants to use it, because that would be too cruel.

Re:Torque MIT Licensed and More "advanced"

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you know it "inside out", could you elaborate on that? I would be interested in the shit level compared to other (ex-)commercial engines.

Also what did you port to the PSP? I was not aware anyone made a Torque game for the PSP!

Re:Torque MIT Licensed and More "advanced"

[Anonymous Coward]

Which Torque games did Sony or Square-Enix publish?

Re:Torque MIT Licensed and More "advanced"

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I once talked to the CTO of GarageGames (back when they were not open-sourced). He said "Torque was 400k lines of really good code, with another 100k thrown in for free". We ran.

This whole article

[gabereiser]

is a lie. It's not the most advanced open source engine (torque engine, gameplay3d, ogre3d, many others). It's not the only game engine with visual tools (jmonkeyengine, torque, unity, leadwerks). Stop trolling trying to get traffic.

Re:This whole article

[goruka]

Torque is shit, Gameplay3d is basic at most, Ogre3d is a renderer not an engine.
Unity and Leadwerks are not opensource.

Re:This whole article

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the informed response to above poster.

Script sharing with non-Godot programs

[tepples]

Is it so important to use an existing language, even at the cost of poorer performance and worse integration?

Yes, so a game using Godot can share game logic code written in the scripting language with a game for a different platform not using Godot. Otherwise your scripters have to either write in another language that compiles to GDScript or violate the "don't repeat yourself" principle by writing everything in both languages and taking extra effort to keep their behavior in manual sync.

Re:Script sharing with non-Godot programs

[goruka]

I understand, but this is not a common case scenario, and more like a rare situation.
It is also not a problem exclusive to GDScript, and might still happen with C#, C++ and other languages.
So, given in far most cases the situation you describe does not apply, using a custom language in this case seems more like "using the best tool for the job " principle.

Re:Script sharing with non-Godot programs

[tepples]

So, given in far most cases the situation you describe does not apply

The features page states that Godot is available for desktop PC operating systems (Windows, OS X, and X11/Linux), one web browser (Chrome through PNaCl), major smartphone operating systems (Android and iOS), and select Sony consoles (PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita). Support for HTML5 and Windows Phone is allegedly coming soon. It sounds like you're claiming that "far most cases" will want to exclude Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii U versions from the outset because those will have to use another engine without GDScript support.

Urho3D

[jones_supa]

Has anyone used the Finnish Urho3D engine? It's odd that it isn't more well known, as the feature list certainly packs a punch.

Agile - Huge Change - Execs Mostly Don't Get It

[under_score]

This might be interesting for people: Enterprise Agility - Pragmatic or Transformative.

JMonkeyEngine?

[Anonymous Coward]

Im not involved with any gaming engine so my opinion is unbiased, this isn't a news article it is an over-hyped marketing blurb with very little credible evidence to back its boastful claims.

Juan Linietzky

[Anonymous Coward]

Juan Linietzky (one of godot's authors) is a very good programmer, I used to like his amiga-like music trackers in linux so much.

Lazy and Incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

But a RTS, a FPS or a simulator, it definitely becomes a hindrance to the gamer, even though it might be convenient for lazy or incompetent programmers.

Hey! I'm a lazy and incompetent programmer you insensitive clod!

[OT] Re:Good

[synaptik]

IIRC, this was the earliest Waiting-For-Godot quip in these comments. So, 'redundant' was not applicable at that time.