Godot Engine is coming along nicely

Ripper

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Every now and then I think it would be a good idea for the modding community to get together and create an open RPG engine, for doing their remakes and so on. The BG2 remake project reminded me again, as it almost seems a pity that games are being remade in engines that themselves are outdated by the time the work is complete.

Godot is becoming a really strong candidate for this sort of community project. Here are some of the things created recently, mostly by lone devs and hobbyists. It's all low budget stuff, but I think it gives an idea of what could be done.

Human Diaspora

Primal Light

Kmitt's game project

Wojtek Pe's game project

Bottomless

SDFGI - Interior

SDFGI - Open World
 
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While we're Waiting for Godot, I'm also still waiting for Gadot, as in the new Wonder Woman movie to be released!! :)
 
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It is a superb 2D engine. I follow their subreddit and there are some really nice 2D projects that pop up there once in a while. 3D... eh, it's not quite yet there. While it is capable, I hear that the performance is not really that great (that might have changed since) and since the community is really 2D oriented, not a lot of 3D assets and tutorials are available, compared to 2D.
 
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Yeah, the 3d engine is being completely rebuilt around Vulkan, and those GI demos are from the nightly builds. The current renderer is limited and missing important optimisations. That said, that first example is from a 3d shooter now released on Steam.

For a modernised NWN-style engine, I'd say even the current version would be adequate.

EDIT: Meant to include this third-person shooter playlist, which is pretty helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqbBeBobXe08DLRMDMyY2YXLx-Q4R9Ujl

https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/716
 
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Some promising projects pushing forward with 3D in Godot. Not up to AAA standards yet, but a lot of that is down to these being little solo projects, and not having a team of artists. With the upcoming 4.0 version, the devs reckon it should be quite possible to do AAA projects.



 
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Interesting new plugin for Godot, designed to make it easy to create dialogs and actions for your characters. Looks pretty nice.

 
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Thanks for sharing! I had missed the first posts, it's a great project. I'm wondering how it compares to Unity in terms of performance, it must be a thorn in their side ;)

There's quite a large choice of languages too.
 
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Thanks for sharing! I had missed the first posts, it's a great project. I'm wondering how it compares to Unity in terms of performance, it must be a thorn in their side ;)

Yes, Epic decided to bestow an "Epic Megagrant" upon them, which is great, but I think we can have a guess about their motivations! :p

I do think it's a great project though. In the last couple of years it's really taken off, and has some big support. I think the new version 4 will deliver a Vulkan renderer with respectable performance, and more developers will begin to take serious notice.

One of the things I like about it, is that its MIT license means that people can co-operate on modifying it for their mutual needs, in any way they like. In regards to RPGs, I've long thought that it would be a good idea to build a collaborative RPG engine, in the style of something like Pathfinder or Solasta, which people can then take to create their own commercial games.
 
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In regards to RPGs, I've long thought that it would be a good idea to build a collaborative RPG engine, in the style of something like Pathfinder or Solasta, which people can then take to create their own commercial games.
Yes, it's an interesting idea, many developers are spending a lot of time on the engine while it's more a tool than a feature like other AAA action titles.

But don't you think that developers would fear their games feel too much alike? Or to avoid that, you mean there would be enough features and options for developers to choose from? Which would make sense, some will want to reduce the scope and complexity, others won't.

It may be possible to reach that goal by first developing plugins for Godot and/or other engines, then creating the engine and its editor with a focus on an RPG genre, and packing everything together.

See for example this plugin, Zara Survival Engine, they made independent code that plugs into Godot, but also Unity, CryEngine, and Flax. It could be one of those starting bricks.
 
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Yes, it's an interesting idea, many developers are spending a lot of time on the engine while it's more a tool than a feature like other AAA action titles.

But don't you think that developers would fear their games feel too much alike? Or to avoid that, you mean there would be enough features and options for developers to choose from? Which would make sense, some will want to reduce the scope and complexity, others won't.

It may be possible to reach that goal by first developing plugins for Godot and/or other engines, then creating the engine and its editor with a focus on an RPG genre, and packing everything together.

See for example this plugin, Zara Survival Engine, they made independent code that plugs into Godot, but also Unity, CryEngine, and Flax. It could be one of those starting bricks.

I think there's a few ways of doing it. If the community created something like a NWN engine as a base, then people without serious coding skills could essentially make their own campaigns, with their own lore, and sell them. I could see a market for that - a bit like an open source and enhanced version of RPGmaker. One guy is already working on his own product, though it's in a voxel style, which I don't enjoy.

Or, it could be designed more as a framework, that doesn't quite give you a base game out of the box. So, kind of extending the engine to easily do the things required by RPGs - dialogs, XP, turn-based movement, inventories, skills systems, etc. Very much like that Zara plugin. I think it probably would make sense to develop it as a plugin to the base engine, unless there's a very good reason to mess with the upstream plumbing.
 
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@Ripper; There's a Kickstarter campaign for a Godot course on RPG game development.
Thought you might be interested to have a look :)

Still 19 days to go, they've already achieved the main goal.

Cool, thanks. I'm happy to throw in for that one.

I'm always pleased to see a bit of life in the game engine threads - sometimes I wonder if anyone is interested. :p

I've wondered recently if the Godot team are a bit frustrated with Amazon. Godot's spent the last couple of years focussed on a new Vulkan renderer, but Amazon just open sourced the successor to Lumberyard, O3DE, and turned it over to the Linux Foundation. It doesn't seem to be an abandonment (the github is very lively with Amazon devs) and it includes the new AAA Atom renderer. I wonder if they could have just adopted that, and focused on other aims.
 
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I'm always pleased to see a bit of life in the game engine threads - sometimes I wonder if anyone is interested. :p
Sometimes I wonder too, last time we discussed about 3D engines, one of us 3 in the conversation quit the forums ;)

Right, Amazon is making its way into games. Do you think they've got any chance, or is that one of the (too) late attempt to enter a market?
 
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Lol.

When it comes to Amazon itself, the spectacular mishandling of Lumberyard is something I've ranted about a couple of times. Not that I care that much, but just that it was just so jaw-droppingly incompetent, and I can almost picture the parade of clueless new managers being drafted in to try and put a brave face on it. If they were just abandoning Lumberyard and calling it open source, I wouldn't think much of it. But this seems to be an almost entirely new engine, which, to their credit, they've said is designed based on the lessons learned with Lumberyard.

I think the jury is very much out on whether it will gain any traction, and if I had to bet, I'd say not - because they still don't seem to have grasped what it would take to really compete in the engine market. But, I like open source, and the code they're putting out there is not to be sneezed at. And, a modern AAA renderer is a major undertaking that an Amazon budget really helps with. If I were running a smaller game engine project, I think I might say, "Well, damn - let's just have that bit and build around it."
 
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...
I'm always pleased to see a bit of life in the game engine threads - sometimes I wonder if anyone is interested. :p
...
I surely am interested, and I follow the discussion here. Unfortunately I don't have much to contribute, so it's only in lurking mode.

pibbur who will definitely start kicking the tutorial project.
 
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I surely am interested, and I follow the discussion here. Unfortunately I don't have much to contribute, so it's only in lurking mode.

pibbur who will definitely start kicking the tutorial project.

I wonder if pibbuR has considered maybe getting involved with something like the Godot project. A little while ago they were asking for people that are interested in rendering and keen to learn, and I noticed that you'd taken up learning Vulkan. Maybe an interesting intersection of interests.
 
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It'd have been great if Godot 2D was there when I started developing my game, it'd have saved a lot of time.
 
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I wonder if pibbuR has considered maybe getting involved with something like the Godot project. A little while ago they were asking for people that are interested in rendering and keen to learn, and I noticed that you'd taken up learning Vulkan. Maybe an interesting intersection of interests.
Could be tempting, and I may look into it, but not now. My main interest is working on mathematical things like cellular automata, self organizing systems, chaos theory (self-disorganizing systems?), and image processing. I have been considering using API's like DirectX and OpenGL because at least in some cases they perform better than GDI+ for 2D output. And since Vulkan seems to be the coming API, I thought learning that one should be my first attempt (I have used DirectX and OpenGl before, but that's a veeeery looong tiiiime agoooo.)

I have not thought of using game engines for this, but I'm open to try it, including Godot. But at the moment only as a user, not a contributor.

However, now I'm concentrating on C++, since C# support for the API's I've looked at leaves something to be desired (not saying that it doesn't exist). Besides, making GUI applications from the ground up is funny (fondly remembering his OS/2 days and also XWindows programming).

import<Human>; std::Male pibbuR{}; (pibbuR==pibbuR)?pibbuR++ : pibbuR--;
 
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