Godot engine developers now on Patreon (call for support)

Hi.

I searched for both Patreon and Godot for the last couple of days, and saw nothing except a mention in the Godot 2.1.3, so I thought this deserved it´s own thread.

Godot, if you haven´t heard, is pretty much the Blender of open source game development (supporting both 2d and 3d game developing), and there are many Blender users (including me) using it. It´s been developing at a fast rate towards 3.0, mainly due to a Mozilla grant, allowing their lead developer, Juan Linietsky (and others of course) to modernize the engine, and bring it to OpenGL 3.3 (much like Blender 2.8), but to keep Juan working on this full time, more money is needed, hence:

The Godot Patreon site

from the page:

Why become a Patron?
Juan Linietsky (also known as Juan Alpaca or reduz) is the lead developer of Godot Engine. He has written most of the engine code and is helping new developers get familiar with the project. We need Juan to work full-time for Godot, so he can lead the work of creating the most amazing game engine ever seen.

If you haven’t heard of it, Godot is a free and open source (MIT) game engine. It is a full, modern and extremely powerful game engine that fits in a 20 MB download, and is aimed at easily developing games of any complexity for any platform, be it big or small, PC or mobile. Our development process is completely open, and our goals are always set by listening to the community.

Juan, the lead developer, has more than 20 years of experience working with video game technology, and lives off doing video game development consulting to several companies. As this is time consuming, he only develops Godot on his free time.

We want to allow Juan work full time on Godot for as long as possible, and eventually hire more developers to work on more and exciting features, so please help by becoming our Patron! Let’s make the best game engine ever, together!

Where do donations go?
All donations go to our fiscal sponsor, Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that supports many high profile open source projects. They use the funds to hire and pay developers according to instructions from the Godot Project Leadership Committee (PLC, a committee constituted of Godot founders and core developers). This is a warranty that your funds will be used solely for the benefit of the project.

Follow Juan at https://twitter.com/reduzio
check devlogs at: https://godotengine.org/devblog

It’s worth noting the incredible progress that the engine has had thanks to the open source community. These contributions will help godot developers work full time on the engine and also in the future hire some of the active contributors. It is becoming more and more apparent that Godot has become to the game engine world what Blender has become to the 3d graphics world- the most viable professional open source solution to meet the industry’s demands. It is democratizing game development - in a sense that is much more true than what Unity or Unreal have done. And it is actually the only open source and free game engine imo that can compete with Unity and Unreal.

It is absolutely worth funding as a project, because we all benefit from it’s development. That development can be much faster. The main programmer Juan has been working on it part time,but Just look at this massive update

If he can write a new 3d engine and so many other features with the other devs- imagine what they can do if they were better funded and had more resources :o

tHIS IS LOOKING AMAZING. I’ll keep the caps for this. :stuck_out_tongue:

How so?

As much as I like Godot I don’t find this to be even remotely true.

I wouldn´t compare Godot to Unreal or Unity featurewise, it´s just not there yet. My interest in Godot is based on what I feel is a huge potential. Hyperbole isn´t necessary, more developers are. That´s why you should support them.

The three greatest weakpoints in Godot 2.x is 3D graphics (performance, shading, ect…), physics, and performance of game logic.

The renderer has been completely redone and there’s active work on replacing the current physics engine with Bullet. There’s also a variant of GDscript in the works called GDnative (it’s similar to C#). The native variant is much faster, but requires the use of an external code editor (ie. no support for writing in the built-in script editor yet).

Just from what I see in the trailer, I think Godot 3.0 has some great potential. Obviously it’s hardly anyway nearly better than Unity or UE4, but the potential is there.

Also, since it’s a small engine, it will be vastly more easy to learn and understand, or implementing unique features from the ground up.

Democratizing game development though… Nah. Game development is not a subject that can be described as democratic or not democratic. Godot 3.0 has become a choice while we already have lots of choices even without it.

Democratic values falls on human moral and ethical behaviour. I can’t see how a game engine has anything to do with anything democratic.

You guys sound like a bunch of people who have yet to read the EULA’s of Unreal or Unity(read them so you know what rights you are signing away) and you are also looking past the second definition of the word democratize. To democratize also means “to make accessible to everyone” (google the word).

I read the EULA’s of Unreal and Unity and frankly the are both sitting on my HDD unused. I will definately look into supporting another Patreon.

I only read one of them and there is nothing in it that was screaming to me that I should not use the engine because of it. What exactly are you referring to?

UE4 is open source (so you can add your own code) and free until you make a certain amount of money, I think $3000 per quarter, at which point you pay 5% royalty on gross revenue. Sounds pretty accessible to me.

UE4 is not open source,the licence is entirely different.
But yes the code is accessible for people which want to dive in.

Edit; I love to see where Godot is heading, sadly thou it doesn´t allow the loading of SBSARs (yet) !?

I don’t want to be too off topic (but maybe EULA, license and game dev isn’t too off topic)

In the Unreal one for example the charge you 5% of your gross revenue, If you guys don’t know what that means gross revenue is the money you get in from selling your game(your retail price times the number of units sold) before you make any deductions for business expenses (salaries, office rent, pay for freelancers etc) if you were selling in the apple app store this is the money you make before even Apple take their 30%.

You could be on the hook to pay them money regardless of whether you make a profit or not.

If you are running a kickstarter and for example you offer early access, those count as sells and the 5% rule applies.

Your records have to be kept well because they can request to Audit them at any time. You are basically given another company access to your books. If the audit doesn’t go well for you like you owe them more 5% of what you were supposed to pay them they can stick you with the bill for the audit.

If you are in a legal dispute with them for Unreal you are in a US court in North Carolina, for Unity it’s either arbitration in Denmark or a case in San Francisco.

There is also details of your machine hardware etc that the collecting from you.

9 times out of 10 I am like most people and don’t read EULA but since in the future I was contemplating trying to make money I thought it would be prudent to sit down and read them, I don’t understand the legal speak 100% but those are the things that jumped out to me it drove me to check out Godot and am liking what I see especially for someone who is just interested in 2D games.

For both engines it is very clear that you don’t have to pay anything, unless you are actually making money. You don’t have to like the conditions, but from a business perspective, they are very fair and make a lot of sense.
Of course, Godot is cheaper for you. But this has significant drawbacks too.

Today, it is very easy to try different state of the art game engines out. That was impossible ten years ago. Game development has become extremely democratized. Everyone can start to create games today, that’s an amazing achievement in my opinion.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. Kickstarter is just a preorder system. Someone gets money to make a game in an engine that one person could never in a lifetime code himself, while continuously getting newer versions and bugfixes.

Please excuse my ignorance. I haven’t use Godot at all other than importing some models and messing around. Do you think you could list your prime reasons for saying this? I’m interested because I’d like to know ahead of time what I’m getting into. What’s missing from Godot that’s keeping it from being a contender to Unity and Unreal?

Democratizing in this contexts means opening up to everyone or allowing everyone to make games I’m assuming. The OP said that Godot was doing that moreso than Unity and Unreal and I don’t think that’s true in the least. If anyone deserves the title of opening up game development to everyone that goes to Unity, which made their game engine affordable (free and relatively inexpensive) at a time when engines like Unreal were closed, expensive and inaccessible to indie developers (until UDK). Or you had to work with wonky broken oss engines (Ogre3d, etc), or on the top end wonky broken proprietary engines that no mere human could use anyway. Godot is not even in the conversation in that respect imo.

There are quite a few things, but a lot of that depends on what you are trying to get out of the engine. It’s very well designed engine. I really do like the design and thinking behind the engine. Very straightforward and easy to understand, imo. Feature wise it’s very weak, they will never be on the cutting edge like Unreal, nor have the huge swell of support that Unity has.

My main issue is documentation. The stuff they have on the site is great, very well written and is actually an enjoyable read, but there just isn’t enough information out there compared to Unreal, and I won’t even go into Unity which probably has had every question under the sun answered somewhere on the interweb.

Definition of Open-source is having the source-code available to public.

Signs an agreement, pays nothing, gets access to the source-code of UE4.

Sounds pretty open-source to me.

Open-Source is not a license. When the source is accessible to public, it is open-source, regardless of any license.

Free Open-Source is a thing. Paid Open-Source is also a thing. Democracy has nothing to do with it. Unless we form a democratic committee to decide whether anything should be free/not free, open-source/not open-source.

If we don’t get to decide anything, none of anything can be democratic.

Does anyone have any decision or control over how game development should be? Probably not. So it sounded funny for me to hear anyone say Godot 3.0 democratizes game development. Godot gives people an appealing choice is what I say.

Or, educate me. I’m open to lessons.

Right, but what features are weak though? Say you wanted to make a simple 3D third person game that looked really great. I see a lot that Godot has but little information about what’s missing. As far as rendering goes, the PBR shading, light probes, reflection/refraction and Voxel GI seem pretty advanced and cutting edge to me. So, it must be something I’m not aware of?