Godot VS Spring RTS game engine

Godot + LLM backend

> I failed to fairly evaluate my options at the start of the project.

The more projects I do, the more time I find that I dedicate to just planning things up front. Sometimes it's fun to just open a game engine and start playing with it (I too have an unfair bias in this area, but towards Godot [https://godotengine.org/]), but if I ever want to build something to release, I start with a spreadsheet.

It’s definitely niche, but one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen was done in godot [0]

One of my coworkers copied our PowerPoint theme, built a super basic presentation mode with transitions and used the engine for interactive demos live in the slides running the code.

[0] https://godotengine.org/

If you are talking about this link [0], the person answering is from the Godot team and not Apple.

[0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#issuecommen...

I don’t think the support depends on distros much, I think the main variable is hardware. If you have a desktop PC bought in the last ~5 years the support should be OK, for the hardware older than that the support is not guaranteed. GeForce GT 730 (launched in 2014) doesn’t support Vulkan, Intel only supports Vulkan on Windows starting from Skylake launched in 2015.

Then there’re quality issues. If you search internets for “Windows Vulkan issue” you’ll find many end users with crashing games, game developers with crashing game engines https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/100807 recommendations to update drivers or disable some Vulkan layers in registry, etc.

On Windows, Vulkan is simply not as reliable as D3D. The reasons include market share, D3D being a requirement to render the desktop, D3D runtime being a part of the OS supported by Microsoft (Vulkan relies solely on GPU vendors), and D3D being older (first version of VK spec released in 2016, D3D11 is from 2009).

Another thing, on Linux, the situation with Vulkan support is less than ideal for mobile and embedded systems. Some embedded ARM SoCs only support GLES 3.1 (which BTW is not too far from D3D 11.0 feature-wise) but not Vulkan.

I personally find Go miles easier than Rust.

Is this the ultimate reason,Go is fast enough without being overally difficult. I'm humbly open to being wrong.

While I'm here, any reason Microsoft isn't sponsoring a solid open source game engine.

Even a bit of support for Godot's C#( help them get it working on web), would be great.

Even better would be a full C# engine with support for web assembly.

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/70796

Historically, open-source software has played a critical role in democratizing the development process. Platforms like Blender for 3D modeling and Godot Engine for game creation have revolutionized the creative process, offering free and powerful alternatives to proprietary solutions. By integrating these tools, The Sandbox leverages the robustness of community-driven technology and innovative coding practices that have been refined over years of collaborative use. The decision to delve into open source is not merely about cost savings or accessibility—it signals a paradigm shift. By embracing transparency and community input, The Sandbox is setting the stage for new forms of digital ownership and interaction. These practices lead to more secure, adaptable, and innovative gaming experiences that challenge the norms of traditional game development.

Great updates! Specifically .NET 8 as well as Typed Dictionaries with GDScript.

Really hoping we see web export for C# soon. https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/70796

> Godot is a game engine. https://godotengine.org

Yeah, I knew that, and precisely because of that I assumed it's a typo :)

We have a native Python client. We can take a look if it works from Godot. Do you know if this is a popular use case?

In the Spring/Recoil RTS game engine[1] we adapted Lua to have deterministic execution allowing synchronous multiplayer simulation. In addition we relatively easily implemented a precise[2] serialization of the Lua VM, allowing us to support save/load for games with no code required from their side.

In other languages these would require much more effort.

[1] https://github.com/spring/spring or https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring (yay for forks!)

[2] Preserving the order of iteration on items in a hash table.

Seems the support would be a realistic feature, though, because it's based on https://springrts.com/ that does support MacOS X.

springrts: Designed for 3D rts games. May be worth looking into if that's what you're making. The site is kind of lack luster so I didn't do too much digging around.

...or Total Annihilation Spring, nowadays known as Spring RTS: https://springrts.com/

My current favorite is Beyond All Reason. Before BAR, my favorite was Zero-K. Both BAR and zk use the same game engine, SpringRTS. BAR and zk are very similar to one another, and they're successors for Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander.

Obligatory mention of another open source RTS engine (lineage tracing back to the original Total Annihilation): https://springrts.com/

Non-OSS Engine?

Total Annihilation for sure, the spiritual successor Supreme Commander is great but a bit too different for me. There's an open source recreation that's a bit rough to learn at first, but it's my favorite game of all time called Spring RTS. https://springrts.com/

The other thing is that if you're going to make an engine focused on rts games, you should probably study an existing RTS-focused engine. For example, here's the source code for Spring. Learn what it does, why, and how. You might decide this is good enough for what you want to do. You might decide this is pretty close, and you'll only want to extend it rather than start from scratch. You might decide to still start from scratch, but at least you learned something about requirements/ methods/ etc.