Godot Engine hits over 50K euros per month in funding
gamingonlinux.com
One of the big winners of the Unity debacle is the free and open source Godot Engine, which has seen its funding soar to a much more impressive level as Unity basically gave them free advertising.
All hail FOSS and Godot.
I really hope Godot will become as good for games like blender is for 3D modeling
Oh god. Please aim higher than that. Not saying that Blender ain't powerful, because it clearly is, but it's UI is just plain shit. (Unless there have been some massive improvements over the last few years.)
They massively changed the UI in 2019, in version 2.8. Hasn't changed much since then though.
If you remember Blender having a bad-looking light grey UI and no support for multiple workspaces, that's the old version.
I mean I'm coming from maya and Max, I taught myself blender last year, UI seemed pretty nice.
I remember messing with it 10 years ago, and really hating it. Nothing like that now.
It WAS shit. Now it's the best UI (and UX) of all 3D software.
I know right! I keep wishing all software would adopt some of it's amazing features, like hover copy-pasting, being able to right-click any button/option to set a custom keyboard shortcut for it, being able to type maths into any numerical field, etc.
I keep going into Google slides and being annoyed I can’t just use G R and S to manipulate objects
Edit: And I love how in Blender, ctrl-z will undo/redo selection. I hate spending so much time selecting things just to misclick in other programs.
Selection beeing part of the undo/redo is sooo good. One of the best things in Blender.
I tried learning it some time ago (months, not years) and I never cussed so much in my life... maybe I'll just get the hang of it eventually, but let's just say, first impression on the UI is not good.
Being intimidated and lost is completely normal given that it looks like this, and there's probably not a single person on the world to have ever used all of Blender's features.
Watch the whole Blender 2.8 fundamentals playlist, things get way easier once you know what to ignore and what UI conventions blender uses as well have a rough overview of the feature set -- because that allows you to ignore even more stuff. Then figure out what you want to do, figure out a workflow, customise the UI to make that particular thing convenient (remapping a couple of keys when you need something often, leave other things you need twice a day in the menus, etc), and bob's your uncle.
Last, but not least: Unless you come from another 3d program and absolutely can't be bothered to re-train your muscle memory use right-click select. Your index finger is going to thank you, it's also a better UI convention in general as it leads to way fewer misclicks (selecting instead of manipulating or the other way around). Personally, I use space bar for the context menu (the default is play video which I rarely use, and if then shift+space isn't exactly awkward). There's also plenty of extensions focussed on particular workflows, e.g. F2 is very common if you do mesh editing, I also use machin3tools, especially for mode switching.
All major general-purpose 3d packages have a feature set so large that it can't possibly fit onto keybindings, and you can't pick them up like picking up a word processor. At the same time it's professional software used by professionals who want to be fast and efficient, so the optimal UI isn't "intuitive" (as in: dumbed down) but flexible and customisable. Blender's defaults aren't bad for some basic work but ultimately you will find them lacking, that's not because the defaults are bad but because they are a compromise between 10000 ways to use the program. Ask three blender users how they use blender and you'll get fifteen answers.
Thanks for the pointers!
Most certainly have been. Worth another look.
I might have to one of these days, but man do I doubt it's UI is usable after being such hot garbage over so many years. Such a shame too because fuck everything about Autodesk and I know Blender has some incredibly powerful tools.
I don’t think anyone would be able to comprehend how much the UI has improved without seeing it themselves. Please take a look sooner than later.
Blender used to be basically unusable for me, the UI made no sense and attempting to use it after learning 3d through maya and 3ds it just didn't work. Then they made it good, I spent a few weeks learning it a few years ago and it's great now. What you're describing is exactly what they went and did
Go and troll somewhere else, it’s clear you won’t change your opinion even though you’re wrong.
There have in fact been massive improvements over the last few years
They updated it to really good stuff with 2.8 like 3 or so years ago.
The... UI in blender is really good. Have you used any other equivalent software or know how complicated it is?
It's not "good but it's a hard problem to solve". It is more "great and it's a hard problem to solve"
Blender 2.79 and earlier was super-unintuitive. 2.8 gave it a fresh coat of paint it's easier and more featureful with each version (Now 3.6, 2.8 was years ago!)
The intuitive UI is the best part of Blender for me so that's weird
it is, I think he's talking about the old ui
That was Blender 2.9, and we're on 3.6! It has gotten fairly good, I love it.
My wife has a few things on YouTube she made with Godot, and she has noticed a significant increase in traffic, since Unity made their blunder.
Godot really deserves their increased popularity and donations, it's absolutely amazing what they have achieved as a true Open Source project that is absolutely 100% free to use, and gives 100% control to game developers.
Yeah, now I'm concerned this might happen with Unreal Engine, even though they've given no indication that it will. Once Godot works out the kinks with level and texture streaming, and has a landscape editor I will be going back to Godot.
Proprietary software can never be truly trusted. You are always at their whims.
Unreal is completely open source, you can compile it yourself.
It is source available, under the terms Epic licenses to you. Not Open Source
When did the term "open source" start including specifics about licensing terms? My understanding from the past few decades was that "open source" meant the source was available for people to look at and compile.
Open source has always meant under a free license. Being able to fork and publish your own versions is integral to the open source philosophy.
No, that is an enumerated freedom of the free software movement, not open source
The same article also talks about the difference between open source and source available:
Under that strict definition, software under the GNU GPL would not be "open source" because the license stays with the code, and is not truly "for any purpose," which is the same deal with the Epic license: you may use, study, change, and distribute the Unreal source code, but it stays under Epic's license.
If you are talking about the FREEDOM to fork and publish and share and whatever, then you mean Free software.
You are not allowed to distribute unreal source. From their FAQ:
Unreal Engine licensees are permitted to post engine code snippets (up to 30 lines) in a public forum, but only for the purpose of discussing the content of the snippet
But the code is easily visible and you can compile it yourself. If you say "I only run software I 100% knows what it does because I can read it's source code" then Unreal Engine fits, it's open source.
That's not why people want an open source game engine though, they want it to be open source so that they can't do a unity
I agree the phrase "open source" is a bit confusing
Ideas started in the 70s, Free Software Movement happened in the 80s, the term Open Source from the 90s as an alternative to “free” to be more clear.
It always meant this.
Yes, open source.
You mean free/libre? Open source literally just means you can see the source.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
And then later on...
Unreal Engine is technically open source, because it's source code is made available to the general public. But it is licensed under a restrictive EULA instead of any of the normal licenses you'd expect for an open source project (MIT, Apache, GPL3, etc).
This is definitely pedantic, but "open source" is a colloquial term, not a technical one. Most people mean FOSS when they say open source, but the terms aren't exactly equivalent. The license that governs the code is really the only part that actually matters.
Let's just call it OpenSource+ at this point ;)
Long-term I think corporate tech as we know it is screwed. Their explosive growth from the pandemic making everyone terminally online is drying up as more and more people go back to touching grass, so now the bill’s coming due and it’s only a matter of time now before Unreal also does something stupid we can’t even imagine for a quick buck
People were terminally online well before 2019. It exacerbated the problem but we're not going back. I don't really think that's a problem, technologically it pushed us further ahead which is always a good thing.
You're right in that we are starting to rediscover what it means to be physically social again. I think that's a good thing, too. People that got away with shit before aren't getting away with it any more.
The problem is that interest rates have gone up after being extremely low ever since the 2008 crash, so investors lost their endless supply of debt-fuelled free money. They can't pump money into companies operating at a loss anymore, so suddenly those companies have to find a way to turn a profit.
And some of them realistically can't. Every other commercial game engine is developed for the studio first; Cry, Source, Unreal etc. These engines were made for, well, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament. The studio saw returns for engine development in the sales of games, then they said "We could probably further monetize the work we've already done if we license the engine and SDK out to third parties."
Unity on the other hand is trying to have the Autodesk/Adobe business model of "We have a free student or hobbyist tier, and then a commercial license that's $100,000 per minute per seat." The thing is, Autodesk and Adobe really don't have realistic competitors in their market sectors. Unity very much does. Unity competes directly with GameMaker Studio, Godot, Unreal, Source 2 among others, the development of which are either directly supported by the sales of first party titles (or are outright FOSS projects in the case of Godot). So Unity has to set their prices to compete in that market, without the support of first party game sales.
You can see how that's working out for them.
The biggest thing about Epic is that it is NOT a publicly traded company.
It doesn't mean that it's not subject to the "Infinite Growth Disease" but look at their biggest investor: Sony and Tencent.
Both Game companies that SHOULD be more interested in having access to a good game engine than to make every dollar's possible.
I'm donating $5, not much but I love to see companies like Unity burn.
Unity’s take is 2.5% past $1m in revenue.
I’m never, ever going to hit those numbers, but if do, I’d rather willingly commit that 2.5% to Godot.
Is that before or after they backtracked?
The point isn't even whether the terms are acceptable anymore. They tried to change the deal retroactively because they felt they had a strong position in that game developers are already invested into their ecosystem.
They may have gone back to saner terms for now but unless the entire management structure resigns, there's no reason not to say they won't try again in the future.
You can't go good business with bad people.
I'm honestly surprised that I have not seen by now a meme pic of Darth Vader telling Lando that the deal is being changed, but the face of Darth Vader is instead the CEO of Unity.
Oh man, this is so beautiful to see. Unity can get fucked.
FREE POP CORN TO WATCH UNITY BURN IN THE DUMPSTER
Very nice. This money will enable them to make it better. One day when I might start learning how to make games I hope that Godot will be one of the best choices out there.
That's impressive and amazing. Let's hope they will put it to good use and speed up the development.
Unity's recent fuck up is a massive boon for them, I really hope they can capitalize on it. This is one of those moments that only happens once, if they push their development and marketing over the next 12 to 18 months they can snag a really significant share of the market and use it to vault themselves to the next go-to engine.
thats impressive
The power of open source!
as a life long gamer who has had to 'grow up' and learn trades to survive and pay bills. it would be hella fun and possibly cathartic to mess with a free game engine. I've been playing games for 30 years. Maybe it's time i take all that knowledge and frustrate myself on a passion project. Thank You Unity for showing me GODOT.
You don’t have to pay for Unity/Unreal either
I’d recommend just using mod tools if you are looking to play around because it covers a lot of the work
Are the people who run unity best mates with musk?
Not by our own accord. Unity is the seemingly cool, weed-sharing guy with shady friends who wanted to introduce you at a party one day and decided to grope your boob to tell Musk how laid back you were and they both laughed.
This characterization disgusts me but it's a perfect analogy.
It's run by the ex CEO of EA.
Blaze your code
This is the way!
No love for Stride?
What's stride?
Glad you asked. It's another open source 3D game engine that may feel a bit more familiar to those who are used to Unity. This is their website.
I'm still just starting to learn it myself, and it can really use some more features, but I think it's pretty cool. I like the UI more than Godot's, and I like working in C#.
Looks interesting. Shame the editor doesn't run on Linux and the engine doesn't target Linux at all. Valve is pushing Linux gaming hard and people are hating Windows 11 every day more and more. Anything exclusively C# will always have a Microsoft shackles issue.
Microsoft has wisely moved a lot of C# development into the .NET Foundation which also promotes the .NET Core Framework for other OSes including Linux, and the Roslyn compiler for C#.
I believe it does currently have Linux support. At least that is one of the build options. I'm not sure what might prevent it from working in Linux, unless the FBX import package isn't compatible.
I haven't tried it myself yet, though.
The only comment is a marketing text that claims “experimental support” for Linux. There's no mention of Linux at all in any of the tutorials. And on the manual it looks very finicky, they only support an old LTS version of Ubuntu and reading the GitHub issues, it looks not only experimental but very rough. As barely working, lot of workarounds, rough. On Godot at least, Linux is a first class citizen, not an afterthought to qualify for grants.
I'll need to play with it some more when I get a chance. In any case, my impression is that it's still developing and still has some way to go. I'd be kinda shocked if Linux doesn't get decent support eventually.
You can work in C# with Godot too.
You can, but I think I read somewhere that it works better with GDScript.
It depends on what you mean by better. GDScript is better integrated into the IDE, with C# really requiring that you use an external code editor currently, but both languages have very similar capabilities.
I found the thing I read earlier: https://popcar.bearblog.dev/unity-to-godot-what-to-expect/
It doesn't sound too bad, really.
I’ve been waiting for this.
Very nice!
Awesome! Hope they'll be able to work on the backlog of promised features more instead of kicking them down the road to the next version.
To be fair, every single project regardless of proprietary or open source has a backlog like that. It's just that open source projects show the backlog and don't have marketing people telling what is and is not in the backlog.
All software development has issues that are simply left unfixed. Some bugs are hard to fix, and don't really matter in the long run.
Example: they don't even bother with memory management on cruise missiles, since eventually its gonna reach its target...
It should help since they'll be able to hire more people to work on the project. Something badly needed dwith Godot is a proper testing workflow. They currently rely on the community to report bugs, and that's just not an efficient workforce. Also doesn't cover all the possible edge cases.
Playing devil's advocate, I'd argue the in the wild community testing is more likely to uncover an edge case that the formal testing didn't envisage..? 🤷🏻♂️
I think we need both. You can never have too much test coverage.
I'm with you on that. I feel like open source is the best possible way to security audit and test issues. As any issue will be out there to see, most proprietary code ends ups being years of duct tape which wouldn't fly if a large community of different backgrounds took a look at the code
I think the priorities for Godot with the new funding should be: