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Godot founders had desperately hoped Unity wouldn't 'blow up' (www.gamedeveloper.com)
submitted 3 months ago by popcar2@programming.dev to c/godot@programming.dev
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[-] lilja@lemmy.ml 107 points 3 months ago

It's great that Godot was in a good place when Unity had its (inevitable?) implosion. Having used both engines I think they are comparable enough that Godot was a perfect fit for small indie and casual devs to move over to without having to learn a completely new workflow. If Godot hadn't been around I don't know where everyone would've migrated to.

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 48 points 3 months ago

I'd argue Unity's implosion was wholly evitable. All they had to do was announce, going forward, there would be different licensing. Big new version six months from now? Hey guess what, we'll do things differently from then on, so make your preparations accordingly. But no - they fucked over existing projects. They tried to retroactively interfere with the business decisions of games that were years into development.

Oracle only gets away with that shit because they're an eight-ton gorilla. And people still desperately look for the exits every time Larry Ellison announces a relicensing scheme based on how many computers you can think of.

[-] chickenf622@sh.itjust.works 79 points 3 months ago

Glad to see there are some level heads leading this project. Also great answer to how to pronounce it, the GIF creator should've gone for that instead of the pun.

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 44 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yeah except it's named after the play so it's definitely pronounced God-oh. I think people just mispronounce it Go-dot if they haven't heard of the play. Looking at you Mr Linus Tips.

[-] circuitfarmer 67 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

From the article linked on this very post:

Those open source values even extend to how you pronounce the engine's name. We asked if Godot is pronounced "Go-dough," like the play, or "Go-dot."

"It's open source," Verschelde said with a grin. "Pronounce it however you like."

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 41 points 3 months ago

They're being diplomatic. From Wikipedia:

The name "Godot" was chosen due to its relation to Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but never will.

[-] circuitfarmer 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It's clear that it's named after the play. It's also clear that the devs really don't care how you say it.

Personally, I think I'll start doing god-ot, as in "got it".

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[-] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 months ago

“Go-dough,” like the play

"Like the play" - but where does the stress go? On the final syllable, as in French? (The play was originally written in French.) On the first syllable, as is more usual in British pronunciation of French words? (The author was Irish and apparently this is how he pronounced it - when speaking English.)

[-] circuitfarmer 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That's exactly the problem with prescriptive pronunciations -- they tend to break down depending on how narrow the transcription, which means they're arbitrary anyway.

If it is truly based on the play, then it would have to be /go.'do/, like the French.

/'go.do/ is indeed an anglicized pronunciation.

Source: am a professional linguist.

Edit: and we should not forget: all human language is ultimately arbitrary in terms of form, modulo limits of human articulation. This is often referred to as Saussure's Principle of Arbitrariness. Which is to say: no one should get bent out of shape about how people pronounce things. If the information transfer was successful, nothing else really matters from a linguistic standpoint.

[-] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 months ago

That's partly what I myself tried to hint at with the question and the parenthetical remarks. Various forms have their own claims to "legitimacy".

And the whole issue somewhat surprised me, because I never even considered that there were these different pronunciations at all. I'm not a native English speaker, and I've always used a more French-like pronunciation of "Godot" that is used in my native language. I expected neither the inital stress nor the -ough diphthong in English, but a more French-like pronunciation. As much as I feel comfortable in English and use it every single day, some of these quirks in pronunciation can still catch me off-guard.

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[-] adavis@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

And its logo is a robot, so it isn't unreasonable to think it's go-dot

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[-] mlg@lemmy.world 68 points 3 months ago

Unity was one of the first applications that made me take a good look at FOSS in general because my experience with it was:

"Hey let's make a game for our final project"

"Okay, let's try Unity"

Flashbanged in light mode

Dark Mode is only available for real cash money subscription license

"Yeah okay nvm let's try something open source lol"

[-] blx@lemmy.zip 29 points 3 months ago

They really paywalled dark mode? That move alone is incredibly dumb. Surefire way to alienate potential new users before they've even tested anything serious.

[-] stom@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 3 months ago

Used to. It took a single registry tweak to enable it which was easily found, but still a pain.

[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

having to hack around your IDE for something that simple is a real bad sign

[-] bbuez@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I'm building something heavily reliant on the physics engine. Unity you need to be an enterprise member for the ability to override methods related to physics. Easy choice

[-] TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Is that why so many unity games have the same feel? I've started looking into the game engine that's used and avoiding unity games.

[-] bbuez@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

I can't say thats why, regardless of engine you're trying to solve basically the same problems, more likely which example project is used as a starter, which I'm sure very much the same can happen regardless of game engine.

With the FOSS spirit however Im sure more contributors will make plenty of viable starter asset packs for inexperienced users and diversify the "feel"

But I can say being able to actually interact with the phys engine is practically what's enabling my project, so I would imagine that also has a part in the feel of games

[-] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Meanwhile in my engine's editor, the default is dark mode, with no plans on making light mode on my end.

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 42 points 3 months ago

Joe-Dot

[-] MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io 9 points 3 months ago

I think it’s pronounced: gif

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 6 points 3 months ago

Disgusting. I love it.

[-] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 3 points 3 months ago

Joe Doe

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[-] xilliah@beehaw.org 38 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I've been with unity since the early days and back then it was this simple little engine.

Today it's a nightmare. I just made an hdr project and imported their own terrain example assets and guess what? It's broken in multiple ways. Now I have to waste time fixing it, instead of focusing on my project. And that's as a unity expert rather than a beginner.

That's not to mention all the errors it loves to throw at me, even though it's all quite vanilla. And how it loves to grab my attention with popup windows that block my view. How builds fail when I focus on another window. I could go on.

They keep adding features without finishing them. Clearly some kind of impulsive marketing behavior, rather than listening to the experts.

The cherry on top is that licensing nonsense they pulled, putting my hard earned livelihood in danger. That stuff really makes you scratch your head and look around.

Seriously, try out Godot.

Edit: I actually just realized I haven't even started yet with truly getting stuff off my chest here.

[-] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

go ahead mate, let it out, you'll feel better

[-] xilliah@beehaw.org 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Okay one thing that bothers me so much is how hard it is to hook custom logic into the play button. Like all I want is my own script to run when someone presses play.

Sometimes this is important because you need to do some processing on the scene. Or perhaps the scene is a UI scene or something and you just want to start from another scene that shows the UI at work.

Like if you are developing a UI, you just wanna press play and it should just work and play. Either from the start scene or a test scene.

That's the weird thing about unity. On one hand it allows you to do a lot of editor customization, and I haven't worked on a project yet that doesn't have some form of that. On the other hand, you can't even hook into or replace the play button logic, which you could argue is the most basic action of all.

Another thing is that a client I am working for just switched to unity's version management. And it just doesn't work in a straight forward way. I still don't have that working because I need to work and get stuff done.

Another thing is that their new animation system didn't even allow me to query the duration of an animation, at least back when it came out and kept marketing with it. We actually ended up writing an entirely parallel system with meta data which was overly complicated for what we needed.

I could go on..

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[-] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 37 points 3 months ago

The pair said it was a major relief that the calamity came after version 4.0 of Godot was released in March of 2023. That version, they felt, was most ready for a sudden rush of new developers.

Sounds like they saw it coming for a long time and successfully prepared for it

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 20 points 3 months ago

No amount of precedent will get me to stop pronouncing it G'doh.

This isn't a Qt situation where the people who named it are objectively wrong about how those letters should get said. I just do not like any of the other options.

[-] killabeezio@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago

Wait, how is it supposed to be pronounced?

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 12 points 3 months ago

Qt? They insist it's "cute," which, no.

Godot? Don't care.

[-] BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago

Always heard it pronouced "cute", how would you pronounce it ?

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 24 points 3 months ago

Cutie.

Because that's how it's fucking spelled.

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[-] killabeezio@lemm.ee 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah. I just say qt as separate letters. Smh

[-] Klear@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

Meanwhile I picked Defold as my engine of choice and absolutely love it.

[-] Myavatargotsnowedon@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago

Does 'it' mean Defold or the learning curve?

[-] Klear@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

I meant Defold, though I picked it up pretty easily. That said, I had very limited programming experience. It might be different for people used to working with other engines.

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[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Godot went from a promising but limited engine for hobbyists to the 2nd most popular engine for solo developers in about a year. We're even finally seeing high quality Godot 3D games releasing to Steam.

Give it a year or two and Godot might start to make headway into the established studios, too.

Unity's implosion has been amazing for loads of engines. other than Godot too. Bevy is making progress, and some of the biggest indies this year are on less known engines, like Balatro's Love engine

[-] GammaGames@beehaw.org 10 points 3 months ago

I’m not really surprised! It’s come a looooong way since 3.0, but I’m glad to hear that the newer users are understanding of the model. I guess we have Blender to thank for that

[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago

Few people get to choose their fate.

[-] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago

How do you guys pronounce it? Go-dot or guh-dough

[-] jerkface@lemmy.ca 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

god-oh with no stressed syllable, like a french person with that name might pronounce it

[-] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 6 points 3 months ago

I was trying to remember the other game making programs other than Godot and unreal, I genuinely forgot about unity

[-] shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 months ago

It serves my purposes well enough, and I enjoy using it.

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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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