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Author Topic: Godot Engine - free as in beer, free as in freedom, awesome 2D/3D game engine.  (Read 1073 times)

Mesa

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Link to website.

So in my loosely-traditional effort of "shilling and gushing about awesome free software", today I wanna introduce y'all aspiring game devs to check this one out. It's not my project, of course, but it's still the most appropriate place for me to post something like this as I imagine that most of people interested in game development will be in this section.

Godot is a game engine mixed with an IDE/editor, very much in the vein of something like Unity or Game Maker, where it provides you with a unified toolset for making games in ways that are less painful than having to code everything yourself from scratch.

The big thing that sets it apart from stuff like GM and Unity and UE is that it's completely free (specifically, under a MIT/BSD-style license) - there are no "free and pro" licenses or stupid EULAs that make for awkward legal situations.
But it's also free in the "free and open source" sorta way - you can see all the code that makes up the engine, compile it yourself (which is very simple as well since there's no dependency hell), or contribute to it directly if you find a bug or have some cool new feature that you'd want to see implemented in the engine itself. Indeed, here is the GitHub repo.

(Also it's cross-platform and can run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and Haiku of all things, for the three people on the internet who actually want to do game dev on that.)


As for the engine itself, I can't fully explain how it operates without just copy-pasting the documentation contents here, so I'll instead link you to that, but it's actually really awesome. Just Trust Me On ThatŪ.

You also get a built-in scripting language called GDScript which has a fairly Python-esque syntax but has some differences from it to make it more suited to the engine (notably, it has no global variables or first class functions), however in the upcoming 3.0 release (around Q2 this year), you'll also get access to C# and the rest of .NET goodiness via embedded Mono, and a node-based visual programming language called VisualScript, akin to UE4's Blueprints, for those who are truly heinous at programming 'the classic way' such as myself.
Also there is at least one madman working on Python support but it's not official.
Also a shading language for those fancy mathcodewizards out there. Seriously, I cannot for the life of me understand how shaders work.

Really, I'll just leave this feature tour page here instead since it probably explains the awesomeness better than I can.
Also it's on Steam, but again, it's free.

So yeah, if you want to do some gamedev but don't know where to start, this may not be the worst thing to at least try.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2017, 02:57:45 am by Maks »
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Arx

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This looks pretty good. Is there a non step-by-step tutorial somewhere? As in one aimed at someone who is already a fully competent programmer.
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Mesa

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I don't think so, but I feel like if you read through those step-by-step docs, you should grasp the idea better and more quickly than someone like me did, and I still actually understood things pretty quickly which is an extreme rarity for me.
(You could also hop onto the official Discord / IRC / whatever, and ask around there.)
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Arx

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Mm, I'm probably going to hold out for the C# support release, then.
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I am on Discord as Arx#2415.
Hail to the mind of man! / Fire in the sky
I've been waiting for you / On this day we die.