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Comment by antsoul | Hacker News Reader

Godot 4.0, with Vulkan support, will replace Unity really quickly.

No it won't, because it doesn't have the GUI tooling at the same level, an optimizing AOT compiler for .NET, ability to write engine pipeline stages in .NET (DOTS), the quantity of items in the asset store, the sponsorship from Nintendo/Google/Microsoft and most important, it isn't part of the curriculum of many top level schools in games design.

It is still a nice engine for small teams though.

You're right, because Godot's GUI tooling is incredibly beyond anything Unity offers (and I say that as someone who primarily uses Unity).

Unity's GUI solutions so far are plagued by terrible performance on the common usage scenarios, terribly undocumented when it comes to making your own components, and the layout system is simply a big mess.

While Godot's isn't anything particularly worth praise by itself (especially when compared to dedicated UI toolkits), the simple fact that creating a simple 2-screen interface does not melt a mobile device's CPU puts it far beyond Unity. That, and the layouting is relatively saner.

So much so, that at the company I work for (which is sort of consulting, not products), when we need to do 2D or UI-heavy games, we go to Godot, to the extent of training Unity developers on it instead of trying to make do with Unity's UI.

I do agree on the other points though, Godot is still very young as a community and so the asset store is pretty vacant.

AOT is in the making [0]. I also think Godot will win in the long run. Unity is a bloated mess. No sponsorship can fix that.

0 - https://godotengine.org/article/csharp-wasm-aot

It seems to be only for WebAssembly. unless I am misreading it.

It has gotten some limited support from Nintendo, surprisingly. They have let a limited number of developers develop for the Switch using Godot on a new SDK.

Being given access to Switch SDK is not quite the same.

50% of the titles, including some first party ones, are using Unity.

Oh, I honestly would have thought it was more. I'm not saying that it's a level playing field. I'm just saying that Godot is making some in roads to normalization and hitting mainstream acceptance in the games industry.

Right after Linux on the Desktop finally hits it big.

I'm still waiting for unity to replace unreal engine. As much as I love unity, the recent unreal engine games have had better netcode.

Unity currently does not even have a stable solution for multiplayer. The existing one (UNET) works but is slated for obsolecence by a new solution, but that is still very early in development, so you have to reach for third-party tools to be able to work with a supported platform.

Even so, that is even a bigger mountain to climb for Godot.

If I was an Unreal user, I wouldn't let go of Blueprints and GC enabled C++.

I know that's a bit of a sarcasm but one word- WSL ;)

What makes you say that? Other than a belief in open source and a sense of optimism?

Do you have a firm grasp on the weaknesses and gaps in Unity as well as it's strengths? Would you say you have a clear understanding of the breadth of features and how much they matter to it's primary markets?

I'd love you to be right but you'll need to do more to convince me that you have some special insight in this matter.

As an experienced web dev with recent (professional) unity exposure, I can say while it is overall a productive framework, it's definitely a bit messy. Many things feel incomplete, important features like addressable feel needlessly complex, and their web services quality (documentation, support, status notifications, etc) is wanting. Not unsalvageable or unusable, but didn't strike me as high enough bar to keep a quality competitor out. If I were starting fresh I would take a hard look at the competition where as going in id assumed unity was going to be an obvious frontrunner.

It doesn't seem like a bad choice but it's definitely not secured it's lead.

https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/benefits_porting_godo...

That's an article on why Godot is porting to Vulkan, not about why games should be ported from Unity to Godot... Unity supports Vulkan too, of course.

I really doubt it. Maybe one day but certainly not "quickly" and especially not just from Vulkan.

I want to like Godot but it feels like it's making the same mistakes Unity 5.x and earlier did with fixed shader and script languages that just aren't as useful as the languages they're abstracting. I want to use GLSL or Vulkan or DX12 not a custom language that will get in my way. Its a C++ engine that uses script runtimes like Unity did. This makes it hard to optimize across languages and why Unity went down the whole IL2CPP path. Now Unity is moving more and more features into C# with a custom C# compiler to better optimize with user code. Godot will have to succeed where Unity could not.

Godot looks very promising but if you don't think its an uphill battle or that Unity is easy to beat you're mistaken.

As long as the gaming hardware giants (consoles and VR) continue partnering closely with Unity and Unreal and giving those engines several months of lead over open-source engines when it comes to platform support... no, it will not.

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