My kid was starting make his 'final exam' project in Godot but the importing functionality from Blender 2.8 is all jacked up. Watching these reels, maybe he should give it another shot.
To be fair (or clear, or whatever), I don't think Unity even supports Blender 2.8 yet. It's a bother because the 2.8 UI is a significant improvement over 2.79.
Maybe it's possible to author files in 2.8 as long as 2.79 is on your PATH to be used by the game engine for importing? I don't know, haven't tried that yet.
Unity shouldn't need to have to support each blender version individually. The DCC import for all supported programs works by launching the DCC program in batch mode, making it convert the file to FBX and importing that. And I would be surprised if blender broke that.
Nice to see some games being developed that actually have decent 3D artwork. Godot is a great engine, no reason it can't become the engine of choice for indies.
I know nothing about game development, but to me that show reel was impressive. Even more impressive is the Patreon donation number. Godot clearly delivers a lot of value to a lot of people.
I'm inspired to give it a try myself at some point!
In the link are some of the reasons Godot might not be ready for your 3D game (it’s a performance analysis of a third-person shooter demo someone made in Godot)
Godot will only ever get a slice of the low end indie market in the 3D space. There are tons of productions that cannot afford to make use of a lot of even moderately advanced engine features because it takes too much effort to generate content of that quality. These are also the kind of productions that are consistently ignored by gamers.
Becomomg a good 3D engine means putting a lot of effort into tooling and the related infrastructure. The runtime part of that is actually minor.
Its quite exciting. I used godot shortly after it became an open source project in 2016 I think. It was cool back then but I never saw any good 3D games built with it. These days I don't do game dev anymore but I'm still impressed with how much progress they have made.
Godot recently announced that they are going to allow you to disable engine features[1].
From the announcement post:
"We got requests from single developers working on 2D games that they would like to disable the 3D editor and nodes from the Create dialog. The reasoning is that, if not in use, they just add clutter."
Many 2D games nowadays are just 3D games using an orthogonal camera because that's still faster on the GPU than the old-school methods of sprite based rendering. I think even SDL2 uses OpenGL acceleration for its "2D" texture and render functions behind the scenes. It's mostly a distinction without a difference.
Godot's 2d engine is completely separate from 3d (unlike Unity that uses 3d engine to render 2d games). You can build export templates without 3d engine for smaller executable size. In 3.2 you will be able to disable 3d features of editor to make your workflow more streamlined.
Why would WebAssembly be used in a game engine? I'm not sure it's really up-and-coming for a high-performance area on a game engine that's already cross-platform.
Now that native runtimes for WASM are starting to arrive, a game engine that used WebAssembly for both native and in-browser exports and supported compiling to WebAssembly through its scripting engine and editor might really be interesting.
