With the fundamentally redesigned 3D physics engine, Godot’s creators want to invalidate one of the game engine’s main criticisms. Also new is the support for the mono SDK and scripting with C#.
The Godot open-source game engine is waiting after about one and a half years of development work with a new major release: Godot 3.0 offers a completely redesigned 3D physics engine with optimized workflow as a major innovation.
Godot’s 3D capabilities were previously considered weak compared to competing for development environments, as chief developer Juan Linietsky admits in Godot 3.0.
The new 3D renderer promises more performance and has some exclusive features ready.
For example, Godot 3.0 is the first game engine to fully support Disney’s principled Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function (BSDF).
In the future, common render options such as albedo, metalness, ambient occlusion, and roughness are rim, anisotropy, subsurface scattering, the clearcoat, refraction, and transmission out-of-the-box are available and can even be combined.
Mono SDK and C # scripting
Thanks to the integration of Mono with Microsoft support, Godot 3.0 can be fully scripted in C # 7.0. The IDEs Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio Code are currently available.
Godot’s creators have also added a new API (Pascal-case) largely compliant with C # language conventions. However, support for C # is not quite complete yet: Godot 3.0 does not allow the export of games written in C # yet.
Getting started with the Godot3 game engine: Why choose the Godot engine?
Now is the best time to develop a game. The first reason is that you are still alive; if you hang it, you can’t create the game anymore. The second reason is that access to development tools has never been so democratic.
That beautiful memory
I still remember that in 2006, the first lesson of my computer graduation course. A grown-up boy, very excited to learn how to develop and start trying to create a crappy little game that exists in my mind. I don’t mean to say how old or nostalgic I am (although both).
The best things we have in the US are the hidden web forums and many anonymous partners with common interests sharing the game development experience and knowledge of game development. I don’t know how I started using Google Search to learn game development at that time.
Although Game Maker is 17 years old and RPG Maker is 24 years old (!), I have never heard of them or used some of their products.
My first class at the university was the foundation of computer programming, which taught the C language. At that time, I learned basic grammar; excited and stupid, my friend decided to make a Zelda game similar to the past clone / inspired match. Indeed, every beginner is a bit silly. Somehow, we managed to buy a Gaming laptop to spend our weekends with fun, not to forget buying cooling pads for gaming, which is very important.
Game engine… everywhere in the game engine.
Hundreds of millions of books, articles, development logs, and social networks spread various knowledge and engines back to the present day. Everything is free or similar to free. List some machines that I can think of in my mind:
- Unity
- Unreal
- Gamemaker
- RPG maker
Because of too many choices, our hearts are usually contradictory. Which one should we choose?
Silk: Godot Engine
During my hard work years, I have accumulated much experience in engines and programming languages. We have to say that we must mention the Unity engine. I dare say this is currently in small studios and independent developers.
The most popular engine is out. 2013 I used it in our beloved Critical Studio to develop some games. At the time, Unity was a great choice compared to other engines.
Unity is expanding in size, has slow loading speeds, and developing 2D games requires a lot of hacking. Now, it’s still a great engine, especially in 3D. However, after the Critical Studio studio was closed, I needed a simpler tool for development.
However, something is missing: a bridge between a local platform and a game framework. I want a tool similar to Haxe Flixel but with more custom controls, like the WYSIWYG or Unity editor.
Next, a little-known new silk appeared in the city; it was the Godot engine. Godot was developed as a private engine in 2007 and was open-sourced until 2014. After ten years of precipitation, it has become very mature.
We built React into a pilot project for Godot testing and defined a new product development process. When we found it, we felt it was likely to have everything Rock Milk and I were searching for. In the end, we liked it because we found that the shortcomings of other engines were perfectly solved here.
Open-source and community
Godot is open source and free forever. The popular point is:
- There is no tax and no so-called annual and quarterly income cap.
- Please don’t force them to use your splash screen, their add-on services, or cloud services that use them to host your projects.
In 2015, Godot joined the Software Freedom Conservancy, which shows Godot is very concerned about this.
Its development community is very active, not to mention its warehouse submissions and often new articles and progress reports. On Discord, you can see the enthusiasm and mutual help that everyone has played, as well as some of their game discussions.
Cross-platform editing and publishing
Godot has a corresponding version of the editor for each operating system: Windows, Mac, and Linux. There is even an experimental version of the Raspberry Pi released by cam12win.
Everything else is as usual:
- Desktop publishing platform: Windows, Mac, Linux
- Mobile publishing platform: Android, iOS, Windows Phone (experimental phase), and BlackBerry system (I am not kidding)
- Web version released with Emscripten (WebGL 2.0 and WebAssembly under development)
Lightweight
- The constructed Godot only takes up 30M of your hard drive and contains (almost) everything. If you need to build a mobile version, you will need to download an additional 200M to create the template, and that’s it.
- I am not here because of the fast download speed or because other engines take up a large space of 3 to 30GB, but I illustrate the Godot team’s degree of performance.
- Godot only needs a blink of an eye, and my old laptop that has been used for four years has not been opened or loaded for more than 5 seconds. The maximum time I have been waiting for is about 1 minute, the time spent between clicking a button to publish to the Debug version of the Android platform.
- Of course, the most important thing is that it can reflect your game’s performance. I WAS DEEPLY SHOCKED when I discovered that the Godot engine was a game developed by Godot!
Friendly version control
- Have you ever encountered a version conflict between a scene, a prefab, or another object file in the repository when using Unity or Unreal? If anything, it’s hard to know how painful it is, especially in large teams.
- Any object in Godot is saved as a text document, a very friendly and readable file format for merge conflicts. We can easily distinguish multiple things in multiple scenes (more on this later) so that each team member can focus on their work.
OK, Godot 3.0 has come…..
Of course, there is no excuse yet to try it out! You can use it to make small demos to help you understand what I am discussing.
Also, take a look at this video and learn about all the new features being developed in the 3.0 release:
You can download an Alpha version if you want. Also, pay attention to this engine’s development route; this is the gospel of game developers!
Also, Godot came to its first milestone, and it already has a sponsor, allowing Juan to fully devote himself to the engine’s development.
I sincerely hope to persuade you to join this passionate community and help increase the Godot engine’s growth rate. Have I touched you?
Comparison of Game engines with Godot.
Unity3D
Unity3D is a truly affordable engine for game developers, with many unmatched users by other machines. More importantly, you only have to pay once, and no matter how successful your game is, don’t worry that Unity will split your income.
Disadvantages: The number of tools is limited, so developers must create them for themselves; doing complex and diverse effects is time-consuming.
GameMaker: Studio
As a developer, Game Maker: Studio is the ideal choice if you want a simple yet fast and straightforward game engine to start the project. although the licensing fee is a bit expensive, the features you can get are still worthwhile;
Pros: Simple and straightforward for all developers; added programming language (GML); no need to handle tasks such as memory management or multithreading; independent of any platform.
Disadvantages: Program debugging in memory problems is cumbersome; licensing fees are relatively expensive.
Rage Engine
The engine is very versatile, and the more well-known games include GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, and many famous masterpieces.
Advantages: Excellent for compatibility and handling of larger worldviews and weather effects; sophisticated AI design leading other engines; very suitable for various gameplay; network programming is speedy; beautiful image quality.
Disadvantages: The interface is poor compared with other top-level engines; the keyboard and mouse control optimization is insufficient.