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Don't go out there!

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Khyrid, Dec 19, 2016.

  1. Khyrid

    Khyrid

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    I have seen horrible things. The other game engines... oh god why? I guess I should start at the beginning.

    A few weeks ago, I returned from the depths of as nowhere as one can be and having been under a rock for so long, a lot had changed with Unity in my absence. I noticed a new splash screen that in my opinion (probably fact) looks very unprofessional. It seemed to me that Unity had gone down a dark path. Long ago it was stated from Unity themselves that there is no Unity free version, it's Unity standard and Unity Pro. That was then.

    It looked to me like I was going to be forced to shovel out the cash or have my game branded with that unwanted splash screen. So, I left. I decided there had to be another viable alternative to Unity. I felt that Unity finally had become too powerful of a company for its own good.

    Esenthel (C++ Variant, Subscription based, roughly $15/m):
    I went small at first. I found that over the years Esenthel was still going. It had continued to survive and update in spite of being basically just one guy behind it. I evaluated it and I actually liked a lot about it. Some aspects of it were alien to me, but it had some features I actually liked more than unity. I did a lot of tutorials, but they ran dry after a while and I was still struggling with the work flow of how I put together character classes, character objects and the other scripts that detail the stats and types of the characters. This part was convoluted to me. The tutorials lacked explanations on too many important things. Also, I feared that if anything happened to the creator(s?) of this program, updates would cease forever. Still I wish Esenthel the best of luck. I needed to move on.

    Unreal Engine 4: (C++ Variant, Blueprint Visual Scripting, Free to download, 5% royalty):
    I felt somewhat at home here. At first everything seemed really nice, in fact too nice. It was fast, beautiful, the world building is great IMO, and the UI was intuitive and nicely laid out. I liked the big bold letters in the editor and the way everything felt solid and well put together. Now I just needed to script something. I opened the first object to see what made it tick, it was a blueprint, a visual node based scripting system. People love this system BTW. I am not one of those people. I hate node scripting, I think it's cancer. I found limited resources on how to use C++ with Unreal. Their First person tutorial was alright I suppose, but it wasn't robust enough to really grapple programing with UE4. There should be way more tutorials. The ones I find for C++ usually seem to de-evolve into blueprint tutorials midway. The truth is, it's hard to use UE4 without blueprint.

    Cry Engine 5.x: (C++? C#?, Flowgraph Visual Scripting, 100% free, or pay what you want):
    Cryengine which had for so long been considered to be a powerful engine out of reach to anyone less than a grand wizard elite programmer was now trying to make themselves more accessible. The best way to do this? Node based visual scripting I guess? They seem to think that you need artists to program games to make people use your engine? I was greeted with bugs on top of bugs right as I started, but their support was very helpful in resolving them, so I could look past the bugs, the support was a big plus for me. I found working in the editor to be perplexing at first. It doesn't start a scene with a default camera I guess, just where ever you are in the editor is where you pop in to the editor. There was a lot of confusion about what the best practice was for... everything. Is what I'm doing for the editor or in the game? It was messy to me. I decided to continue my search.

    Shiva 3D 1.9.2 : (Lua, C++ I think, $200 for basic, 1K for pro, but you can't buy it):
    These guys are still going, even after their company was liquidated. I have to give them credit, they believe in what they are doing. They have an awkward interface that turns away most prospective users and a poor business model. But, I don't care about that, I care about the engine and how I will code. Right away I found myself coding in Shiva with this bizarre Lua language. It all felt weird, but it worked. They have a lot of good tutorials and documentation too, but it can be hard to find because their website seems to be in a state of slow change. You can't just buy a license, you need to request one and if they get back to you they might sell you one I guess. In the meantime you can use the limited free version that lets you export only to web. I could try to work with these guys, but it seems a pain. But, if this is what I need to use then so be it. First, not that I intend to go crawling back to Unity, but let me go back one last time to check their pricing model, I think I forgot to do that, it's still free and 120/month last time I checked I think...

    Unity: (C#, JavaScript Variant, Free, 35/m, 125/m, more):
    Wait... they have a new model, 35/m? No stupid splash screen? I guess that's a reasonable compromise... and I already know Unity very well... When I consider the time it will take to learn a new editor, language etc, and time is money, this option really is the best for me. So, I guess Unity wins, like it always knew that it would. But, still, I warn you all. If Unity continues to grow in power, a day will come when they start to do dumb things and we cannot do anything about it because they control everything in the indie game world. I watched the UE4 guys give a presentation at a college and they were nervous and shaky and they tried to pitch their product, they didn't used to be that way in the past, it's because they know they are the small fish now. There is no real competition to Unity when it comes to the Indie market. Yeah, their going to get my money, they win. I give up. All I can hope now is that I don't get a hot iron to my face for trying to run away.
     
  2. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    Welcome back to the cult. Leaving is pretty challenging. I tried GameMakerStudio for a while, but it didn't take me long to come back. While Unity has its problems, it does seem to be better then most of the competition.

    Just consider yourself fortunate that you missed the Lithium debacle while you were away. Dumb things have happened.
     
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  3. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    This is a big part of the reason I try to support various other game dev tools out there. I want there to be alternatives. It is never a good thing to have just one giant company basically owning a field. I mean I have nothing against Unity and they have made something that millions of people love. I just don't want to see the day where it truly is only Unity and nothing else except part-time open source alternatives. That would be a sad day indeed.
     
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  4. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    To be honest, you CAN work without blueprints, but UE4 usually furiously resists that. Using C++ requires fairly high C++ skill, and a lot of diving into code. Majority of tutorials were written by one guy with nickname Rama, last time I checked.

    https://wiki.unrealengine.com/First_Person_Shooter_C++_Tutorial
     
  5. JincSoft

    JincSoft

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    There is a course that I would strongly recommend on udemy (https://www.udemy.com/unrealcourse/) that covers the C++ side very well if anyone is interested. It starts from the very beginning on how to use C++ and works its way up. Even though there are portions of the project that use blueprint visual scripting, they explain why it may be a good idea to do it this way (i.e. blueprint nodes that bind input to C++ classes). One nice thing that I like about the creator behind this course is that at one point, code structure ended up being terrible and he goes through and shows you how to refactor and debug using visual studio.

    On a side note the guys behind that UE4 course are gearing up to launch one that covers how to make an RPG in Unity that looks pretty promising (https://www.kickstarter.com/project...ke-a-complete-role-playing-game-i/description).
     
  6. Khyrid

    Khyrid

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    Game maker studio is fantastic for 2D games, but Unity shouldn't be counted out for 2D games either. I've used both for many years.
     
  7. SunnySunshine

    SunnySunshine

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    You might wanna check out Xenko too.

    But yeah, I agree. There's really no competition to Unity when it comes to indie games. While there may be plenty of other capable engines, there's nothing that can compare to the size of Unity's community, resources available and asset store. It really makes all the difference.
     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2016
  8. derf

    derf

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    Say it with me. Unity is mother, Unity is father.
     
  9. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    These two (particularly the first one) are really the only reason I came back to the forums recently. There are several people here I sort of feel a connection with (almost like friends that I've never actually met). There are some interesting discussions fairly often and some people are actually making games and I enjoy seeing their progress and encouraging them to keep going.

    If the same was true... the community size and activity... at the forum of another game dev kit that I preferred I would be there instead.
     
  10. gian-reto-alig

    gian-reto-alig

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    Your Expierience reflect mine over the last few years. Tried almost the same set of other engines... and here I am again, working in Unity yet again after abandoning it in the 3.5 days because of its lacking power, and after the 5.0 upgrade because of the mess the engine was in right after the move to 5.x.


    my expierience with Esenthel Engine was that the engine really was ahead of its time, giving you a working night/day cycle system, dynamic skybox, cloud shadows, volumetric lighting, Tesselation and Terrain streaming when Unity was still stuck in its 3.x cycle and pretty much struggling to catch up to the top notch engines at the time, and Unreal Engine 4 was most probably still on the drawing board.
    Yet even then people were questioning the performance of the engine, the editor was looking dated and was quite quirky, and there was never enough tutorials around to get the hang of the engine.
    Still, I loved what the guy had produced. It was a really promising engine that, given time, could have evolved into a real challenger for the big names in the industry... but then I started to realize that the dev priorities of the developer were... weird.
    He developed a mobile editor while some bugs in the engine were waiting to be fixed for years. Not saying that not having cloud shadows in a DX11 build was a big thing... but given that they worked fine in a DX9 build, and the DX11 functionalities were one of the big selling points of the engine at the time, I found it hard to believe that the dev wouldn't just find some time to fix those small bugs instead of working on the most useless feature ever. Who wants to develop games on their mobile phone, or tiny ass tablet screen???
    And it didn't stop there. After a year of similar weird dev priorities, finally the dev started working on revamping the editor. Good call, given the thing, while functional, looked quite dated, lacked quite some functionality, and was just weird at places... but the new editor would cost extra. Well, not the end of the world for the free loaders given that the "upgrade cost" for the editor was not that bad... but I have spent 750 bucks prior to that for limited source access, as I wanted to extend the editor functionality. I had chucked in another 250$ into the "pay for features you want to see developed at a faster pace" scheme of the developer, which, while not particularly a bad idea (crwod funding basically), did tickle some people the wrong way who thought the dev was withholding features behind a paywall. Given that, I wasn't to amused that I was expected to cough up cash again to get one of the few useful upgrades developed during my 1.5 years of using the engine.

    At that point I was ready to move on, and lucky for me, Unity 4 was just out and looking good. I was quite sad to leave Esenthel engine because at its core, it was quite a good engine. Just let down by a dev following more and more weird priorities probably in a struggle to rake in enough cash to survive with his engine. Really, he has my sympathy, and I don't look back on spending some cash on his engine. At some point I just had to realize his vision for the engine no longer aligned with my needs.


    I didn't move back to Unity without having a quick look at CryEngine though. Really, after struggling a little bit with the dated editor, and running an incredibly buggy example project, I had seen enough. Maybe a little bit unfair to judge so quickly, but I was certain after a quick test run that I wouldn't work very efficient in this engine. Given that I was happy with the dated editor of Esenthel for 1.5 years, that says something.


    After Unity 5.0 destroyed my will to continue working with Unity, and to continue pursue the project I was working on at the time (the new PhysX was completly unusable for my Physics setup carefully tweaked in Unity 4.x), I decided to give Unity a break and look into Unreal Engine 4.
    Really, I liked Unreal Engine 4. I like the editor, even though it feels cluttered to me, and I HATE the intrusive tutorial notifications. I like the simplicity of getting good posteffects setup, I like the curves tool that is so useful for roads and rivers. I love the node based material editor.
    But all of this couldn't make me overlook my HATE for blueprint. And my even bigger hate for the guys at epic that decided that blueprint would be their new poster child and whoever didn't pick up Unreal C++ during the Unreal Engine 3 / UDK days could go and **** off as the tutorials would now cover blueprint front and center. All the books on Unreal I found covered blueprint front and center. And then there was one C++ book for Unreal Engine 4 I found... which was "learning C++ with UE4". Yeah, very helpful. Lets implement a container class in UE4. Lets skip the more elaborate things like HOW TO SETUP A ****ING PLAYERCONTROLLER IN C++.... because we want to teach beginners how to C++, not C++ programmers how to UE4... seldomly been so dissapointed in a book. And mostly, its on me, because I misinterpreted the sales blurp on what this book would teach readers :/

    I GUESS if I would have sticked to it, searched the web more and gotten into contact with Unreal C++ experts I might have soldiered through at the end. I might have found a love for the engine despite the blueprint clutter everwhere.
    Instead I returned yet again to Unity to find that Unity 5.3 wasn't as unusable anymore as the 5.0 version. And I had to find that with all its faults, Unity still is the best engine for me when it comes to letting me work efficiently without getting in my way.
     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2016
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  11. adur

    adur

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    There's also the godot engine. It's free, opensource, and looks very slick. It's got some Python variant for scripting so that might not be everyone's cup of tea. It's rapidly improving and seem very promising...
    https://godotengine.org/
     
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  12. SarfaraazAlladin

    SarfaraazAlladin

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    Thanks for the overview @Khyrid I think I'll stick to Unity now. Haha
     
  13. Khyrid

    Khyrid

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    Yeah, we think we have it bad here until we go somewhere else and realize how bad bad really can get.
     
  14. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    That said if people think Unreal 4 is bad they likely haven't spent time with Unreal 3. I tried picking up UDK before Unity and it wasn't intuitive or enjoyable to work with at all. If that wasn't bad enough you also had to pay 25% royalties. :p
     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2016
  15. larku

    larku

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    Their latest release notes "future" section indicates that c# and mono are coming to Godot too.

    It's about a 25mb download and seems pretty solid to me.
     
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  16. UnityFan18

    UnityFan18

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    Hello,

    While I love Unity, I too looked at other engines and came back to Unity primarily due to the ease of use, and the amount of tutorials, support and the community.

    I did see this video put out by Godot which looked really interesting and pretty cool considering it is open source software. It seems they are aiming for Unity developers with their 3.0. In addition, I think competition from Godot is will be a great thing for Unity :)

     
    Last edited: Oct 14, 2017
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  17. Peter77

    Peter77

    QA Jesus

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    I'm impressed with all the new features in 3.0, that video was just great. How long did they work on the 3.0 release?

    I imagine people who move to Godot would be hobbyists mostly, or let's say non-paying people. It probably doesn't matter too much to Unity Technologies if non-paying people leave their product.

    I guess most people who pay for Unity are trying to earn money at one point, thus have invested in Unity already (be it money, time, building a code base, etc) which matters to them and it's harder to move away from Unity at this time.

    To me, it also seems Unity Technologies doesn't really care for competition. It seems they have transcended that phase a couple of years ago and can since then do whatever they want and people still stick to Unity.
     
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  18. Martin_H

    Martin_H

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    If they "try to catch up" they will always be behind. Imho they should rather focus on having a better toolset for making pixelart retro games, something more efficient than gamemaker but with proper c# scripting. If I ever start working on a 2D pixelart game I'll take a closer look at the competition because I'm not yet invested in Unity in that area and the 2D forum here seems rather dead.
     
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  19. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    Uh, is Godot engine in some kind of trouble unless it acquires new converts each week or something?

    It seems to be a trend where there are people mysteriously arriving on unity forums to spread the word or something.

    This kind of behavior makes stay the hell away from it.
     
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  20. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest

    Can't deny it looks rather "shiny" though.. That would be because of the bloom.!
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 14, 2017
  21. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    I hate bloom.
     
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  22. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Latest release of Unity added tilemap support to the engine. :D

    https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2017.2.0

    Regarding the sub-forum I believe that's mostly because people just ask their questions in the generic forums.
     
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  23. UnityFan18

    UnityFan18

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    I just read their website, and they have been working on 3.0 for less than a year. It was supposed to come out in the first half of 2017. However, as of right now, there is no specific release date for 3.0.

    In addition, I also thought that the 3.0 release was also targeted towards hobbyists. However, when I came across an interview with the lead developer who said "So, in pratice, we aim for an engine that is easier to use than Unity, and that looks better than Unreal, and we are very close to getting there in the upcoming Godot 3.0."

    (Source: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/dec/13/2016-godot-interview-juan-linietsky/

    Based on this quote, I get the impression that they want to become better than Unreal and Unity. They are working on adding c# support, which seems aimed at 2D Unity developers. I also noticed they are now asking for donations to help fund development of the game engine.

    Would you say that Unity in their current phase can take more creative risks compared to other game engines? I am a hobbyist and I really enjoy using Unity. I have only used Unity Personal, but I do see your point in users who have invested in Pro or Plus. In addition, with Unity there are so much learning resources available and Unity has done a tremendous job in making it more approachable to use their engine when compared to other engines.
     
    Last edited: Oct 14, 2017
  24. Rodolfo-Rubens

    Rodolfo-Rubens

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    You guys should try 3d game studio, dark basic, blitz 3d, ogre 3d, etc... Those are the engines I used before I started using Unity.

    Unity is life!
     
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  25. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Competition... having many solid options is definitely what any sane person wants. And apparently even the partially insane because I want that too. ;) Hopefully Godot continues to improve at the rate it has been.

    Honestly I kind of viewed it as a joke in the way of thinking it will be another only worked on so long then fade away or progress would be so slow it wouod be years before it was solid and truly usable for a good base of use cases.

    It is actually impressive how fsr it has come in a short time. I am not so sure about the not being able to keep up part if progress continues at the same rate or even faster than it has been could surpass in time.

    And I think a lot of that has to do with Godot likely having a superior architecture. I had the impression from the brief look I had thst they "built it right" as far as being clean and much eaier to enhance and so forth.

    And that does make a huge difference especially as more and more features are added. An old codebase can be a real handicap after a while with more time spent on refactoring existing code just to be able to add new features than time spent on actually adding the new features.

    Anyway let's hope Unity, UE, GMS, Godot and the many others all keep improving.
     
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  26. Martin_H

    Martin_H

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    What else are they supposed to say while looking for funding? The only thing that matters is what they actually achieve.

    I did a quick google search while contemplating to make a "waiting for godot" joke, and then I found out that there is a version of the play performed by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen:
     
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  27. mysticfall

    mysticfall

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    I really like the fact that Godot seems to be a real open source project, in a sense that everyone can participate in the development, creating feature requests, or discuss its future direction.

    From their project page at Github, I can see that they already have 10k+ commits and 2k issues which is a good sign that the project has a good momentum and we'll see more improvements in future.

    I'd move over myself if they had fewer missing features that I need for my project, or if they supported JVM binding. But I'd like to wish them good luck and will keep my eyes on for their future development.
     
  28. neubiole

    neubiole

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    I agree that we should be careful in going somewhere if we want everything to be free from issues. Open source is good for those who lave to share their skills and knowledge to the general users.
     
  29. snacktime

    snacktime

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    I don't know why developers can't resist the temptation to create their own languages. Unity made that mistake and took years to admit it and then some time to undo it. Godot is making the same mistake. Please just stop.
     
  30. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    Speaking of opensource, there are also ogre3d and irrlicht. Not sure if they're still being actively developed. I actually saw some games released using those engines, I mean frameworks.
     
  31. mysticfall

    mysticfall

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    I believe it has less to do with the tendency among elite developers to create their own wheels than to the peculiar aspect of game development that it's often a collaboration job between developers and non-developers. It's the same reason why we have so many visual scripting languages even in Unity.

    And it seems that Gordot will officially support C# in 3.0 version as well.
     
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  32. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    Probably runs in the genetics of those who are determined to make their own engine. After all, if you are going to go down that path, why not go all the way?
     
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  33. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    OpenMW (recreation of the Morrowind engine) is the only project I regularly track that made use of Ogre3D, but they ended up abandoning it (link below with multiple reasons) due to performance problems, that granted were partially their fault for sticking to an older release, and switched to OpenSceneGraph.

    https://openmw.org/2015/announcing-switch-openscenegraph/
    http://www.openscenegraph.org/
     
  34. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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    I would imagine it's an attempt to make the language more 'accessible', at least in the case of Unity. I have to admit that, even though I think visual scripting is a limiting way of doing things, at this point I think it's a much better idea than trying to make a sort of 'urban dictionary' programming language with a pseudocode API. Although, I think that the future of programming for the masses is probably some kind of intelligent compiler with an ability to understand and organise fragmented pseudocode input (probably spoken), but that's a whole different scenario from what's going on now.
     
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  35. snacktime

    snacktime

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    Ya I read their page on languages. The problem is nobody in the industry wants another general purpose language. You can't leverage it for server/multiplayer stuff, you generally can't do better then an existing language like C#.

    They specifically wanted a dynamically typed language, something else the industry generally doesn't want/need.

    When you have to explain to people you are misunderstood, it's probably you not everyone else.
     
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  36. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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    Yeah I think the problem is that in any programming language, you need to do X number of things in X number of ways, and beyond a certain point you simply can't simplify things any more without removing some of those possibilities. I think the reason why the programming workflow, and the general programming interface and API of programming languages, has not changed in so long is that it has sort of reached a limit in terms of how the syntax for any given operation can be either reduced in complexity or merged with other syntax without making that syntax more difficult to contextualise. It's like, you have 26 letters in the alphabet and you can try to do away with some, or merge them but you lose part of your capability to communicate.

    And the problem with any kind of programming interface (written, spoken, visual or otherwise) is that no matter what form the syntax is manipulated, it still must remain conceptually the same, and does not get any simpler.

    So the only way I think that programming could get easier is with an 'intelligent compiler',, but it's important that this is a case of taking away interactivity not increasing it. It might be a very highly functional form of interactivity, but it's still technically a more limited one.
     
  37. Peter77

    Peter77

    QA Jesus

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    Like fetlang? ;)
    https://github.com/Property404/fetlang
     
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  38. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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  39. mysticfall

    mysticfall

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  40. Martin_H

    Martin_H

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    More like all kinds of kinks.

    For real though, I don't see how it makes anything clearer, I'd much rather have syntax highlighted C# than anything that tries to be "human readable" language. I feel like it would be just adding another layer of obfuscation and un-intuitive abstraction on top of programming.
     
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  41. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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    Definitely agree, was just joking. Until an intelligent compiler comes along, any kind of pseudocode API is just a fetish.
     
  42. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Nope they are aiming at Unity users, Godot will never get all tools , features, asset store or fast releases Unity has.
    For example there is no terrain able to match with Unity terrain editing combined with CTS (or megasplat) + Gaia.

    It will be capable 3D engine, but as open source you can't expect it to match engines supported by thousand people or asset store. It really depends if you want some engine with enought maturity and tools or if you are making a small 3D game with lower requirements.
     
  43. mysticfall

    mysticfall

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    I believe being open source doesn't always mean it will always be something inferior to its proprietary competitors, as it can work both ways.

    It just means that the project's future will be more directly affected by the volume of its demand, rather than by profit. As such, many open source projects are considered 'a toy' compared to their commercial counterparts, while others are literally blowing them out of their business, depending on their respective size of the userbase.

    If you are unfamiliar with open source, just consider how successful Skyrim has become due to its modability with 54k+ mods, and consider if any single game studio could have created so many mods by what development resources they have.

    I'm not claiming that Gordot will become something like that in future. But being an open source project is not really a limitation of how big it can grow, as it's actually just a possibility which can work both ways.
     
  44. zenGarden

    zenGarden

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    Lot of great games are moddable, but none was open source at start when they shipped. Modding is not open source, people mods are just extensions, the game is still a AAA game made by hundred people.

    There is many open source (Godot, Torque 3D, Panda 3D, JME3 , Ogre 3D and more older ones) ,but those never evolved in terms of world editor/features/tools/visual editors.None reach 10% of features and tools you can find in other big ones.

    For Godot 3 it looks different, but still it can't compare with engines actively developped by entire teams. Until godot gets some store with paid items to motivate plugin developpers i don't think it will ever get as good plugins as Asset Store has.

    If you got a team and want to make some open world and you need all tools and terrain graphics i don't think you will pick up Godot until you are ready to put years coding yourself the tools and features.
    While Godot can become for small to medium 3D games, but it will take some years.
     
  45. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    C# is "human readable", though.

    The language part of programming is pretty simple. Compare the number of words and symbols in C# to the number in English... yikes! The rules are all much clearer, as there's no ambiguity, no contradiction, far fewer special cases, reduced context sensitivity, and our special friend tonality is nowhere to be found! It just looks complicated because it uses symbols more than it uses words, and the information expressed is of a type that most people aren't used to working with.

    Programming languages aren't perfect by any stretch. Still, I'm pretty sure that making programming languages more like English/Mandarin/your-choice-of-other-language is missing the point. The challenge doesn't come from the language, it comes from changing how you think about things.

    That's also why it's neat to learn some different types of languages, at least to an introductory level. Someone who only understands C-style languages may understand the internals of how computers process data, but an intro to SQL will give some interesting insight on how to think about large data sets from the perspective of making queries (oddly enough, being a "structured query langauge" ;)).
     
  46. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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    Yeah I think this is the key thing - no matter which symbols are used to manipulate the code - mandarin, egyptian hieroglyphs or nodes/noodles - the API is always conceptually identical and you can't change that.

    The only way to make programming fundamentally more accessible is with an intelligent compiler that is basically a 'programmer' with enough patience to piece together layman's language and pseudocode, and to ask the right questions.
     
  47. mysticfall

    mysticfall

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    Modding was just an example to emphasize how voluntary contributions can improve a software way beyond what any single company can achieve. And if I meant it literally, think about what people might have done to Skyrim's engine itself if it was actually an open source game.

    Linux, Firefox, Blender, WordPress, LibreOffice(OpenOffice), and so on are all examples of very successful open source softwares.

    And if we also consider frameworks, or more developer oriented projects, there are so many other examples which either forced commercial competitors to open source their projects or even abandon them.

    So again, being open source doesn't necessarily mean a project will never be successful or good quality as a commercial counterpart.

    The analogy with modding was to emphasize exactly this point. Who do you think have paid all those Skrim modders to motivate them to create 54k mods?

    Do you think Bethesda could have done it easily if they tried, with their entire team actively developing on the project?

    Again, I'm not saying that Gordot will ever become as successful as that. But being an open source project doesn't necessarily eliminate such a possibility, as evidenced by countless examples by other successful open source projects.
     
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2017
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  48. Deleted User

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    Agreed, but it's GODOT not Flash Gordot or Gordot the Gofer. Personally when I first came across it GODOT didn't look any different to every other bland 2D engine in existance.. One of the biggest problems with open source is having a framework others will justify putting their time in for no money.

    It has to be a decent and powerful framework to begin with before it'll actually take off, what I've seen of GODOT 3 it could be a possibility. Still lacking in some major areas but pretty strong in others and the inclusion of C# as opposed to a random self made language could help with that.

    I can live with some lack of features if the benefits offset the costs, for example GD doesn't have a terrain system.. I've no issues with making one but the only reason I'd do so is because it's open source, it's nice not to have to be at the whim of the developer when bugs occur or features need adding / improving especially as it can hurt at release time. Being able to commit your work for others to improve back to a main branch is a great thing as well..

    Also licensing, something under MIT you can do whatever you want with it.. Let's say you want to add mod support and build an editor off the source then there's nothing in the way of politics to worry about.

    So I'm all up for open source but again the core of it has to be worth it.. Yes I get this is all rather obvious but it does make a major impact.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 18, 2017
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  49. mysticfall

    mysticfall

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    I never suspected that I've been misspelling it all along. Thanks! :p
     
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  50. Martin_H

    Martin_H

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    I 100% agree! I should have used a different term here, but I didn't know which one best fits what I was trying to express.
     
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