Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

lionkor

> Our engine had a unique feature called Spaces: separate worlds/levels that you can instantiate

This is, as far as I can tell, exactly what the Godot engine does[1]. That engine also has a browser (wasm) target.

[1]: https://godotengine.org/

View on HN

Not only does it have a wasm target, it also has a web version: https://editor.godotengine.org/

I suppose it's not any kind of priority to the project. Tested it a bit and it does seem to work :), but it's slower than running it natively.

Thats because the editor is built in godot as well, as far as i recall

I don't see how it's different than scenes in Unity either

Worlds/Spaces in Godot at least are more to do with physics/lighting than scenes/levels. So two objects in the same scene can occupy different "spaces" (for physics), "scenarios" (for rendering), or "worlds" (which encapsulate a space and scenario, for both physics and rendering). Objects in these different contexts will appear in the same scene but will be separated in terms of those contexts and won't e.g. collide with each other or be affected by forces from one space if in a different space, or be lit by lights from a different scenario.

Interesting. What are the use cases for being able to do this?

The main use case is for subviewports - nodes which contain a scene tree but aren't rendered with the main window, instead you grab a texture from the viewport and can display that how you like, as a mesh texture or as a sprite/texture rect, input to a shader, etc (similar to render textures in unity). You can apply a World resource to the subviewport (the default is, I believe, for them to have their own worlds), and that ensures that they are treated entirely separately from the main viewport's children and will only collide with things and be lit by objects in the subviewport. But, that may not be desired - you may want to use a subviewport to render certain objects and then apply post-processing only to those objects, but otherwise treat them like objects in the main scene - in that case you can have the subviewport share the same World as the main viewport, causing objects inside and outside of the subviewport to interact.

Similarly, there are often gameplay reasons you may want to separate physics/lighting for particular objects, and maybe even have several "spaces" in which objects can interact that you want to swap out at runtime. Stealth games where shadows are important to the gameplay, or games that have an "inner" and an "outer" in terms of physics (maybe a car in the world, and then objects inside the car in their own inner world that maybe obey slightly different physics parameters, for example).

I see. Thank you for the explanation!

Everything in Godot is a scene, from actual scenes to groups of objects, etc.

It makes composing and managing objects and compositions much easier than just with the tree view.

Like a Unity prefab, but much better

Reply on news.ycombinator.com