alt Hacker NewsGodot 4.6 Release: It's all about your flow
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With all these editor improvements, we should now be waiting for someone to realize that a soft fork + a thoughtful plugin-based architecture using the original as a base means that lots of the effort that has gone into Godot's (snappy) UI could be repurposed and make for better web development inspector/debugger experience than using browsers' own built-in tools.
A "native" text editor, style properties viewer, profiler timeline, (and more, e.g., animation curve editor), instead of the ones we've got (like the one in Firefox, that they wrote in React[1] where you can see visible, whole-panel flicker when the UI repaints itself every time the cursor blinks)? Yes, please.
1. <https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools/frontend/re...>
The new UI is terrific. The old Godot was already pretty decent, allowing me to release my indie game on Steam. But this one is so much better.
Godot is slowly becoming the next Blender, a dominant open source success story.
I tried gamedev before, but was never able to fully commit to getting over the learning curve for Unity and Unreal. Godot has proved much easier to just jump in and make things. I really like where the project is heading. Godot + Blender = the dream
wow, this release looks really cool! this part especially:
> With the new LibGodot, you can now embed the engine directly into your own applications. Instead of running Godot as a separate executable, you can control startup, manage the engine loop, and integrate it seamlessly into custom workflows.
it might seem like a small thing but the IoC setup of Godot makes it really annoying to build certain game infrastructure (specifically in my case, automated testing) because everything is beholden to the main engine loop, to the node tree getting mounted, etc. being able to take control of that and have the engine run under your own terms is super cool.
that being said, I'll probably wait for a couple versions before trying it out on my game since I'm sure it's not exactly battle-tested yet
I've loved using Godot more, and it's been very informative as the first big OSS project where I'm closely following the development / proposals / devchat. I don't agree on many of the points by people downthread: I use C# almost exclusively and while it's been awkward (and clearly not a "priority") it's pretty seamless to use once you set up some stuff (though it certainly helps if you keep much of your logic in C# and mostly use Godot as a frontend, crossing the boundary is kinda awkward and slow).
Having said that, I do agree that Godot has a bit of complicated identity: it is at once geared towards being a good first programming experience, and a general purpose replacement for stuff like Unity.
I'd prefer a focus on the second part, there's a huge industry of game-devs right now, and providing them with the stability of a solid, free, transparent engine would be a great service.
Does anybody have tips for running Godot on KDE Plasma + Wayland? I tried 4.0 and an earlier 3.x release from the store but both hung shortly after startup. Maybe need some Wayland argument, will check.
I'm pretty excited about libgodot! Let's see what use cases people can come up with for it.
Love the workflow focus in this release. 2D animations/hitboxes and terrain creation was tedious enough that I built a tool around it—draw, animate, export to Godot if anyone needs it. It also now become a full game engine!
Shameless self plug: We've been building an AI agent plugin for Godot[0]. It uses ~50 MCP tool integrations to help you work within the editor.
Happy to answer any questions
[0] https://ziva.sh
Is there anything in this which will make it easier/better to make GUI applications?
https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor
kind of has me considering using Godot for creating a drawing program....
I am curious to see how much the editor have been increasing in executable size after each version
I really want to experiment with Godot but Unreal keeps giving me free assets....
For 3D, the return of in-engine inverse kinematic nodes (SkeletonModifier3D descendants) has been a big deal for me.
The old 3.x system was a mess, so it was dropped in 4.0. The community filled a lot of the gaps in the meantime, but having the new system (in-engine) is great.
I've been working with it for a few weeks from git master, and everything just works as I expect. It definitely needs some more user-level documentation, though: if I hadn't been following development, I don't think I'd know what everything does, and if someone were new to IK generally, it'd be hard to get off of the ground.
They're still quintupling down on their sad Python-lite clone language and toy inbuilt text editor, what a damn shame. Still no way to avoid GC in C#. Godot had real potential, but they continue to insist it is a playground for learning about game development, rather than a tool to release a real game. If a fraction of gdscript and editor manhours had gone into real engine development, it would be better than Unity by now.
My 13yo son recently discovered Godot and I'm very impressed by how accessible and powerful it all is. He had started gamedev a few years ago with Scratch. Figured out Roblox Studio a fair amount, but it's super quirky, plus he wanted to do 2D games. Tried some other stuff (eg pygame) but that's just super low level, inaccessible, plus you can't properly distribute pygame games for shit. Godot is on a whole nother level.
I had never bothered pointing him to it, because I remembered Godot as "a bunch of C++ libraries for gamedev". I'm not even sure whether that's ever been the case or just an incorrect memory, but today's Godot is incomparable to that. The editor UI is very full featured, and you can easily make simple 2D games with relatively small amounts of programming. It includes a level editor, animation stuff, and so on. It's just very feature complete, and I think it's very impressive for a FOSS project to be so accessible to newcomers stumbling into it by chance. Points also to the people making videos.
Also sidenote I think GDScript is great. My son had tried Unity first, but the C# compile cycle was so slow that he kept getting out of the flow. As a developer dad, Godot's GDScript struck me as a super weird "not invented here" thing at first, but realizing what tradeoffs they're going for (familiarity, fast edit-compile-run cycle, concurrency, lightweight binding to C++ internals, etc), I now see the point completely. I'm sure it has plenty quirks but for a beginner like my son it's a perfect fit.
Bottom line, he was able to make a Flappy Bird clone and put it on his Android phone, totally solo (except the Android export, and with lots of YouTube support), in like two afternoons. Drew the art, coded the dynamics, everything. Hats off to the Godot team!