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I'm done waiting for Godot by Mircea

I'm done waiting for Godot

Mircea

Yes the pun had to be done, and you'll hear it a lot in this community. I've been excited about this engine for a long time now: As an open source game developer, Godot has been on my waiting list for quite a while.

https://godotengine.org

So, what is Godot? For those who haven't heard of it before: Godot is a game engine and development toolkit, similar to Unity or Unreal Engine. The important difference is that unlike those, it's free and open-source software... one that aims to provide the same features and performance as its proprietary counterparts. Godot is to the world of game development what Blender is to the world of animators.

Now the engine has been around for a few years under version 2.1. The problem is that this version has never been optimized for 3D support, only the 2D framework received any real attention: While 3D games were possible, they were implemented and ran very poorly rendering them practically unusable. Godot 3.0 was officially released just a few days ago and finally changed all that: A new 3D framework was added allowing for modern optimized functionality! On top of that it introduced another long awaited feature: Visual scripting, letting game logics be defined via nodes without you even having to write a line of code.

Last week I've began learning this engine. I'm still just at the beginning, less than where I was with Blender over half a decade back. It doesn't help that the interface is still not optimized, and you have to guess what things mean as well as clicking a lot of entries in a precise order to get to certain menus. I predict it will be a bumpy ride, but I want to learn this engine and do things with it. Godot is still in its infancy by comparison, so you can be sure it will get better over time... for now though early adopters must deal with a few annoyances and bugs.

This screenshot marks my first attempt at a game project in Godot: I experimented with creating an apartment interior using the 3D tilemap (grid map) feature, on which I edited a few freebie textures to have diffuse / normal / depth / specular / roughness maps. The walls are made of little 2D planes (0.25 meters across) which you're able to paint directly inside the editor to create your own interior scene. Doors and windows will be placed in spaces designated for them, and the structure aims to be compatible with pathfinding for the AI to navigate. For now that's all there is to it, but next I'll be working on adding objects and logics. Needless to say that if this project gets far, you can expect the typical type of game I would normally be making :)

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