godot-proposals VS bevy

Godot was fine, for the most part, it's a good engine for small games. The main issue was around working together and resolving conflicts with git (Godot isn't really working and constantly kept changing IDs in resource files), and it kept losing data in scenes when the code changed so we had to rebuild things several times. On previous test games we also ran into huge performance issues in the editor when we wanted to do too much work in scenes, so we had to switch to doing most of the work in code.

The worst part was when I had to rip out a bunch of testing code that used @tool for release as it seemed to cause issues when doing a release build. The engine is generally not great when you want to follow clean software engineering (e.g. dependency injection is not possible, I opened a proposal to that end here[1]).

[1]: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/8850

Yes, there could be the option to open at least 2 tabs at the same time, when working with scripts. This has probably already been suggested in: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals

I cannot tell exactly where the jitter is from the video, but if it is what I'm thinking of, it is a known issue, see here. There is a proposal to fix this, with tons of discussion here. Try some of the workarounds mentioned in these two links. Game looks great by the way!

It's in the release notes. Here is a link to the pull request, based on this proposal.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/auto-lod.1440610/

"Discussion about Virtualized Geometry (as introduced by UE5)" https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/2793

UE5 Unreal Engine 5 docs > Rendering features > Nanites:

This looks amazing, and I really hope it gains some traction.

That being said, one of the biggest annoyances I had trying to switch to Godot from Unity is that their Scene view doesn't reflect the Game view at runtime (you can see the hierarchy, but there's no visuals, no gizmos, no debug raycasting or colliders)[1]. It seems this engine has the same missing feature?

[1]https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7213

Here is a discussion from the proposal repo I found with the topic of improving C# support: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions/4... .

One of the first comments was quick to point out that in a poll from back then 81% of users used GDScript primarily. They followed up with saying:

> As far as I know, the only reason why Godot got C# support is because of Microsoft's grant (and of course neikeq enthusiasm ).

It's my impression poking around that a lot of the community, at least at the time, had a hard time imagining that for Godot to gain serious mainstream adoption as THE OSS game engine, the project would need to focus on the what the development makeup would be at that future time and how they can attract those crowds. So, the user makeup of now may not look like the makeup of then.

Further down though somebody points out:

> Most people using Godot will make toy projects. That is the same for all other engines and developer tools as a whole. C# is crucial in serious projects, at least in 3D which is where I spend most of my time. Having first-class support for it (both in terms of tutorials in the documentation as well as in the engine) will go a long way towards making better-performing games for developers making serious projects.

This post has been timely as I've been checking out Godot going through a massive 12 hour tutorial but using C# instead of GDScript; because of course. The entire time my mind kept wandering back to this quote I've seen posted various places:

> C# is faster, but requires some expensive marshalling when talking to Godot.

I kept thinking "but why?! C# has excellent interop support and should be able to map directly over Godot's types. That seems like it's going to be a serious limitation long term..".

Don't have the money to hire a developer? That's OK too! You can make a proposal and discuss with the community, and if a community member with the skills wants it enough as well, then it might get implemented!

Doesn't support C#(this is being worked on but possible waiting for .NET 8 with AOT but then it still needs work).

Doesn't support the new 4.0 renderer, this is being worked on too. Webgpu support: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/6646 .

Main issues right now that I'm aware of.

I don't see WASM/WebGPU changing anything when it comes to gaming, as an industry, personally. 3d visualizations and interactive websites? Yeah definitely a nice improvement over WebGL 2, if years late.

WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.

Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.

That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.

(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)

I was working through an example in the repo for the Bevy game engine recently and came across this code

That's possible. I did spend quite a bit of time tinkering with compiler flags, and followed the recommendations.

Some notes I found just now seems to agree with my results, though: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3978#issuecomment-...

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

I've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation. You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)

I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context.

I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread with UI rendering suuucks.

If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

These days, some game engines have done pretty well at making compute shaders easy to use (such as Bevy [1] -- disclaimer, I contribute to that engine). But telling the scientific/financial/etc. community that they need to run their code inside a game engine to get a decent experience is a hard sell. It's not a great situation compared to how easy it is on NVIDIA's stack.

[1]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/shader...

Most of Nanite (at least, everything but the LOD system, I haven't tried that part, and the compute rasterizer due to lack of storage image atomics because Metal lacks them...) is implementable in WebGPU actually.

I have a PR that does a lot of the same things (meshlets, visbuffer, material depth, two pass occlusion culling) open for Bevy https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/10164 that I've been working on, which uses WebGPU.

WebGPU is actually a pretty good API imo. It's missing some advanced features like raytracing, mesh shaders, and subgroup operations (coming soon!), but it can still do a lot.

The much bigger missing feature is "bindless" support (non-uniform arrays of bound resources). BindGroup overhead (and ergonomics) is a significant downside.