Godot 4.2 released; A brand new era of FOSS game creation software

Godot 4.2 arrives in style! (godotengine.org)

Inside the article, the full changelog.

Download links for your OS on the Godot Engine homepage.
Godot Engine - Free and open source 2D and 3D game engine

Godot Engine is free and open-source software with no royalties or income limits attached. It also has a for-profit component just like the Blender Foundation (W4 Games, whose purpose will be to provide services such as the ability to export to the consoles). The fact it is MIT licensed means you can keep the source of your game encrypted and secured.


This post has been completely overhauled as a result of the 4.0 release, because it is almost like a new engine at this point, but the innovative node-based workflow with built-in script editing remains intact.

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I’m torn with this engine. In one hand you have full freedom with the software as it is open source. You make a game and it’s yours. No strings attached.

But imagine you work hundreds of hours in Godot engine instead of hundreds of hours in unity or UE4. You might limit your own development for future employment and game making for other platforms. Also team projects, where there are multitude more people that know the other game engines better than those that use Godot.

Also documentation. Youtube tutorials is plenty for unity and UE4, not so with Godot.

Replace these words…

Godot >> Blender
Unity and UE4 >> Max and Maya
game making >> production 3D work
other game engines >> commercial 3D software

and you wind up with a statement that still has about the same level of truth (despite all of the progress Blender has made).

Part of Godot’s situation right now is that it’s considered the new kid on the block as far as game engines go (as Unreal tools have been available for modders at least for many years while Godot was mainly an in-house solution). I think Godot does have a chance due to how it approaches game creation in a different way compared to the established solutions (such as the scene instances which effectively unifies the otherwise separate concepts of objects and levels).

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Godot is pretty good for the limited development resources they’ve been able to dedicate. The Kickstarter sure helped and, aside from their choice of scripting language, they don’t seem to be ideologically driven to go down one path compared to another. A lot of practicality (in development, licensing, features, etc) in that project.

That said, it IS new and it IS missing features that are becoming pretty standard for people writing indie games with the other “free to get started” solutions. Their 3D pipeline & features are obviously of more interest to Blender heads than their more developed 2D pipeline & features… and it is lacking. That said, the worst comparison is toward the non-BGE alternatives. I do believe that with the exception of IK, one could make in Godot even the best of what can be made in BGE with negligible to no extra effort. For a lot of Blenderheads, that’s probably the more important comparison to make.

Ace, the big difference with your comparison is Unreal is 100% free to use. If you sell your game, you pay a small 5% fee to Epic. I honestly don’t see why someone would look at another option. There is no downside to using Unreal. I guess to each their own. If you are serious on learning a game engine, why not spend your time learning one of the best engines out there. If you are serious about getting hired by a game company and you show up with a cool demo using Godot, It isn’t going to help you to have Godot experience.

I understand wanting to support opensource, but in this case my opinion is it seems a bit foolish to spending time learning Godot, sorry, just my 2 cents.

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I agree, koots2. If your aim is to make a free game, Unreal has no downsides at all. If your idea is to make a game for sale, 5% of the sale price is a small downside all things considered (because, seriously, you should already be doing the paperwork needed!).

Godot occupies a similar niche (minus the ideology) as the BGE, idTech, & Ogre3D. There are some people that are driven to ensure their project only uses open-source software and open-source code. For those, there are a variety of options available with varying levels of DIY required to get it up and running, importing content from other applications (like Blender), and compiling for distribution.

Godot is evolving into an engine that is less powerful than some of the alternatives, but comes with a much lower DIY requirement. It seems to be looking at filling the niche in the open-source engine niche that Unity did for a long time amongst commercial engines. Not only do you get an engine with which to build the game upon, there is a lot of tools being provided to allow the non-developer to do so.

I personally think it has strong potential in that niche, but it needs to build the community some more. GameKit was awesome too (I still play around with it occasionally), but the community support wasn’t there and so it died on the vine.

For starters, other engines like Godot present a different solution towards various components of game creation which may make it easier and more straightforward for some. With Godot at least, I find it nice to not have to mess with compiling and just write all the code I need in the application itself. It’s a lot like GameMaker in this respect (an engine which used to be my favorite application before I downloaded Blender).

I know that UE4 is a good engine, but the Godot approach to things have a strong appeal to me (and many others as well since the number of contributors to the code-base and the total amount of commits has been trending upwards). Another thing was the fact that Godot does not make any use of .fbx (so the progress made on such an exporter is not affected by the GPL and the usability is not dependent on Autodesk’s whims).

Not once did I say that Godot is superior or comparable to Unity and Unreal (at least in the 3D area), but its unique approach to game design (that is claimed to be more flexible than filling a series of scenes with prefabs) is something you don’t see much of right now.

Unreal may have the best in terms of raw 3D functionality, but it also depends on the ancillary aspects such as workflow, presentation, ease of use, ect…

I haven’t messed with it much, but I really like Godot. It has first class Blender support, and runs excellent on Linux, which gives it an edge over Unreal and Unity for my situation.

The negative is the documentation/training is sparse, and I don’t have the freetime to trial and error my way through learning it. To be fair though, if I applied myself a bit I probably could at least whip out a Tetris clone or something.

@koots2
Sorry I cannot understand your standpoint. I mean its obvious that unreal has more to offer on the AAA side. But seriously… This is not what is needed always. As Ace Dragon already stated. I mean we are all Blender users and we should know better. Blender is aiming at smaller studios. I think Godot is aiming at a similar audience. Especially Indies can be very happy with it. Even if Autodesk 3dsmax wouldn’t have a pricetag, I wouldn’t choose it. Blender gives me a solid ground to make absolutely professional work. Same goes for godot.

Godot has has a great workflow, its Scene System is amazing. It offers a great 2D engine. It offers a solid 3D engine. The scripting language is integrated so tightly to the engine. It is a pleasure to script in godot. And for me the most important part, it has a very healthy developement. That gives me the confidence that problems we encounter now, be it less features or bugs, will be managed in the future. This are all points that made it easy for me to choose godot. And with the 2.0 release we have a very solid engine. So many bugs have been squashed that made it harder to work with before.
The main dev is aiming to bring advanced graphical features in the future. When blender supports pbr he wants to implement a direct exporter from blender to godot. Which exports everything directly in godots new scene format. That way you will have a seamingless experience to bring your blender 3d stuff into godot.

I have no experience with the unreal engine. But I have to admit I don’t even want to try it out, because all my needs are satisfied with the engine I have. And godot is truly free! There are no strings attached. This is something you cannot say about unreal or any other bigger engine out there.
But hey, thats the beauty of having some choice. There is not one solution that fits everyone.

@xrg
yes… documentation could be better probably. But this is something that will definatelly change in the future! :slight_smile:

@ndee

This would be the main reason to use Godot. You have to be committed 100% to Godot and it will work. While the developers of the Godot engine gives 100% themselves.

Also I would like to ask. You have used the engine it seems, how the stability of the finished game? Any memory leaks or crashes?

Godot seems interesting enough to poke into a bit :slight_smile: , does it have besides scripting additionally some visual programming via Nodes available?

Really rooting for the Godot devs and will probably have a play around with it later, but for me, I need Unity for the work I do (and we are also looking into Unreal for our next project), so I am doubtful I’ll do more than play around. Still, I am really looking forward to seeing what they do with their 3d engine, as it would be awesome to have a truly free 3d engine that can come close to Unity (at least, I can kind of imagine that, but maybe not Unreal…)

@ndee,

Thanks for the comment. Like I said, to each their own :slight_smile: I guess my perspective simplified is you have 2 free to use applications… If you are looking to make yourself more marketable, why not go with an engine with more more support. If you are looking to make a game, and you need to find people to work on it, going with the better supported engine seems like a good idea to me.

I get the open source pull, I love blender.

I started using godot a few months ago and must say that I am loving the engine. It is true that the documentation is not complete atm, but if you go to their fb group and just ask about something, you would get a response fairly quickly. :slight_smile:

The editor is so quick and lightweight compared to unity3d.

I agree. Godot seems more useful if you have some niche needs, like if you love certain parts of it (scene stuff and its scripting language), it works better in linux (if that’s really the case)/is more lightweight or if you don’t like closed source stuff.

For anyone else though UE4/unity are probably more useful. With UE4 there’s not only more tutorials/documentation (including sample projects) but you can even use Epic Games’ free UE4 assets in your own games which can save tons of work. UE4 only being for AAA devs is complete false in my opinion, it’s way easier for a single indie dev or a group of people getting started with the engine because of the tutorials/documentation and the free assets alone.

The Blender vs Maya etc and Godot vs UE4 etc comparison also doesn’t work because Maya is $1000 or something and UE4 is free (well, 5% royalty when you’re selling a lot). And how much is that 5% really when you’re shipping your final game? Your 3D UE4 game will probably have more appeal and sell more so the royalty is basically negated when comparing it to a game shipped in Godot.

Anyway, I don’t really have anything against Godot and it will probably become better with time, but for now, if you’re serious about making a game (as in shipping it to sell) you should consider if Godot is the best option for what you’re doing or if you’re just using it because it’s 100% free.

IIRC, apparently their waiting to do the overhaul of the 3d engine until more is know on Vulkan API and adoption. I´ll be waiting til then :slight_smile: But I really have my hopes up!

I used to think that having Linux support is a big plus. After years watching Linux scene it appears Linux support doesn’t have quite an impact on sales of games.

The market is still below 2%. At some point in time having Linux support provided media buzz. Nowadays no one cares any longer.

So why is this list so short: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine)#List_of_games ? And why everyone, including smallest devs, still use Unity instead of anything else?

Because it has a smaller userbase? This is not surprising if a piece of software has a small userbase and no marketing?

Anyway, I like godot, and it’s UI, and especially the new multiple scene editing as that makes life so much easier, and I know these things are tricky to implement. I haven’t tried out live scene editing yet, but that does look really cool. Other than that I haven’t been able to keep track of the changes as the changelog is a bit difficult to find and the website in general very slow to load.

For that last part, judging from the feedback of the published projects so far it seems pretty good. That’s not to say things might be totally free of issues (but the userbase is quite vigilant about reporting everything that might be going wrong to the issue tracker). I also found that projects tend to move between versions well (my project looks fairly intact in version 2 for instance, but any issue should be reported so things can be fixed for the final release).

Also, the committed 100 percent part can be applied to the use of almost any engine (even the BGE, because a good 3D game tends to take a while to make). If you’re not entirely committed then it might take years to make meaningful progress (and in my case at least, I need to divide my time between working on games and making Cycles art).


Anyway, I don’t really have anything against Godot and it will probably become better with time, but for now, if you’re serious about making a game (as in shipping it to sell) you should consider if Godot is the best option for what you’re doing or if you’re just using it because it’s 100% free.

For PC and mobile at least, I doubt the majority of gamers (and especially mobile players) have purposely decided to ignore everything not made in Unity and Unreal (they just want a game that is fun and is not riddled with bugs).