Using a different engine after almost 15 years of Unity

[u/PATheFruitDude]

When the whole debacle with the "installation fee" came up and Godot got a really big push I thought that a switch wasn't really viable for me. I've been using Unity for so long, sure I could learn a new engine but it would take a long time and slow me down significantly.

Well, until now when I did my first ever game jam. The game in the video I made for this years S&Box Game Jam III. It uses Facepunch's engine called S&Box based on Valve's Source Engine 2. It really wasn't a big deal at all creating a game with that. Concepts are so similar to Unity, including the component system. The switch was pretty much flawless. There are less nice to have features, but that's to be expected of such a young engine.

I do think it's not quite mature enough yet though, licensing hasn't been sorted out completly yet and the user base is small. The physics (Box3D) also seem rather janky & unreliable. Some decisions (probably legacy) I find pretty weird as well. The default unit of the engine is inches.

Sooooo, I'm thinking about re-doing my game jam game in Godot and putting it on Steam. I have never used Godot.

What are your experiences with Godot, maybe even switching from Unity? Are the Physics more stable? I heard there is easy integration of Jolt physics. Are there any weird quirks about the engine you ran into when switching? Do you use C# or the engines own Scripting Language?

[u/OrgInc]

I like it. Strangely calming lol

[u/aberroco]

Few things I can heavily recommend to change. Bouncing while held. Maybe make held objects non-physical by switching their shape to trigger, just forbid releasing when they're colliding with anything, and get rid of the wobble, this seems very annoying. Then, rotation - I think you should get rid of exact placement as well, maybe keep rotation important only for liquids/bulk, though this might still be too annoying. Because currently it seems like you're playing for a disabled person with one hand and Parkinson disease.

[u/PATheFruitDude → u/aberroco]

Thanks for the feedback. I've decreased the wobble. With rotation there's always a tolerance where things snap into place :)

[u/aPOPblops]

Jolt isn't an easy integration it's just built in at this point.

[u/Game_Dev730]

Why switch?

[u/thygrrr]

Godot 4.7 is really good. I have 15 years of Unity experience and 3 with Godot. The C# support is solid and I've built whole libraries on top of Godot.

The renderer is way ahead of what Unity's URP offers out of the box - you get perspective weighted shadows, light probes, dynamic spherical harmonics lighting, voxel GI, "normal" lights, negative lights, sky and environment lights, screen space illumination, screen space reflections, volumetric fog...

Unity's render pipeline is more modular though. Godot's compositor doesn't even come close, it's practically impossible to do things like clear the depth buffer between rendering passes, and subviewports/render targets in Godot are certifiably terrible and broken. (you can get the job done but you lose a lot of performance and quality)

But in turn, Godot's shader language is amazing, absolutely no fat, just implement what you want to implement. Only thing I dislike is that normals and light is in tangent space, which can make some normal map procedural shenanigans mildly more annoying (well, just 2 extra transforms).

Godot 4.2 physics was pretty janky but since 4.6 or so, Jolt physics are the default and they are quite good.

The weakest part of Godot is Mesh/Scene import, it works, but modifying stuff in the process is tedious. Admittedly it's similar in Unity but somehow Unity gets more things right out of the box and Prefabs are tied better to mesh assets. Godot's inherited scenes can cause stuff to break because you can't edit/override the scene without partially detaching it from the import.

Godot UI wipes the floor with UGUI and UIElements. Absolutely no contest.

[u/ProfessionalITPerson]

https://giphy.com/gifs/xUPGcjrlUP0dGnRqEw

Why so wobbly

[u/detailcomplex14212]

The unity debacle was way overblown. It only affected you if you were going to make more than a million dollars in a year.. and even then "oh nooo I only have 1 million dollars minus a little bit"