Talk about anything: Page 38 - Godot Community Forums

Talk about anything

jbskaggs

@cybereality said: Yes, a big problem with open source is that everyone wants to do their own thing. I had the same problem and wasted years trying to write my own engine (well not really wasted, since know I know a whole lot, but I never had any chance of finishing the project). I see it all the time on Reddit, some person spends like 2 or 3 years writing some crazy engine, that looks great, open sources is it and then that is the last you ever hear. No one uses it at all.

Even big companies that have tried like Amazon, etc. or the O3DE, Stride (aka Xenko) etc. fail to gain any market share. Even while being technically better than Unity and open source. It's mostly about the community. The technology doesn't matter as much as people think, there are lots of great engines, what you need is people to talk to, to get help, good documentation, fast bug fixes, and feedback on feature requests, etc. Which Godot has, and why it will continue to be successful, and I think overtake all other engines in the next few years (at least for indies, AAA will still use Unreal for the obvious reasons).

Yep I think that pretty well summarizes it.

I am a sorta underdog person. I will always try and see if I can find another less popular product to support, and help a smaller venue grow. Once something becomes really popular then I tend to move to a new venue.

Or if something is really popular I tend to wait till its past the fad then try it. Movies, books, whatever. This sometimes works to my detriment- but I like doing things a differently than what the crowd likes. If I was into drugs and rock Id almost be a punk rocker with my attitude. Instead I just come off as quirky and weird.

Like one time I found a chinese restaurant that you sat in the kitchen and ate. There was no actual dining room. Just a room, sinks, fridges, stove and couple of tables. You ate their and could watch chinese pet shows with the owner. Loved that place. Loved the weirdness of it and how it stood against everything we think of as a restaurant.

cybereality

Well I was set on using Unreal for a while. Never finished anything, but I had some promising prototypes. However, I just built this new computer, it cost me $4,000 and it has everything. A 16-core / 32-thread CPU, RX 6800 XT, 6TB of SSD storage (no HDD drives), 64GB of RAM, best of everything. And I installed UE4 and opened a blank project. Literally a project with 1 cube in it. And it took 15 minutes to open (I timed it on my phone). That's just unacceptable, 15 minutes to load a cube. Just wasting my time.

Kojack

@jbskaggs said: I use picocad which I think was created for pico8. I saw the pico8 suite and thought the concept looked fun. But I didnt have an extra $15 right now.

Did you release your engine? Is it scripted in c++ as well?

Ah, picocad. Yep, that was made in Pico 8.

There's also Tic-80, it's a free open source clone of Pico 8 but with slightly higher specs (higher res screen, etc).

My Kage (Kojack's Acronym Game Engine, pronounced like the japanese word for shadow) isn't public, yet. I've used it with my students for years, one day I'll put it out. Here's a game one of my students made with it:

My class (intro to C++) had them learn C++ and learn Kage, making a break out clone, a 2d tile based map editor and a platform game which integrated the editor, all done in 12 weeks. The engine is pure C++. There's an animation editor and particle system editor, but no scene editing, that's all done in code (which is why students wrote their own editor). I'm currently porting it to an Entity Component System.

So, yeah, I'm really a C++ guy (teaching it for 20 years, using it for years before that). For my own projects I'd prefer to be in there. But Godot looks like a great alternative to Unity and Unreal for my students, so I'm learning it so I can show them an alternative. The small, run anywhere and open source nature make it great for keeping on a flash drive, compared to bloated engines (the two Us) that needs admin permissions to install.

fire7side

Unity and Unreal are total bloatware, but at least with Unreal, it seems like it's worth it somehow. I was doing a project in Unity and it seemed like they did an update every month or so and would drive me crazy until I downloaded it, then I would have to fix all my code that didn't work. Every update got bigger and bigger and I live in the country and always have a slow connection. When I downloaded Godot, I was impressed except maybe the language was a little immature a couple years ago. Now it's great. I've wasted time checking out different engines and modeling programs. I finally settled on Blender first. Now, I feel like I'll just stay with Godot and not waste time checking out other engines unless they really mess it up. I like the decisions they are making. For me, it's a hobby and I want to relax while I'm working on a game. I'd like to finish a game, but it doesn't really matter. It's just doing that next thing in the line up.

Kojack

I don't want to mention non Godot stuff too much, but I thought I'd show a little example of my one. Here's is a very simplistic character controller with velocity based left/right movement and jumping when on the ground.

void Cat::update(float deltaT)
{
	b2Fixture* groundTouch = kage::Physics::getTouching(m_body, 2);
	auto vel = velocity();
	vel.x = 0;
	if (kage::Input::isKeyDown(sf::Keyboard::Left))
		vel.x = -4;
	if (kage::Input::isKeyDown(sf::Keyboard::Right))
		vel.x = 4;
	if (kage::Input::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Up) && groundTouch != NULL)
		vel.y = -8;
	velocity(vel);
}

and I (roughly) recreated it in Godot as:

func _process(delta):
	var col = get_colliding_bodies()
	var vel = linear_velocity
	vel.x=0
	vel.y+=200*delta
	if Input.is_action_pressed("LEFT"):
		vel.x = -100
	if Input.is_action_pressed("RIGHT"):
		vel.x = 100
	if Input.is_action_just_pressed("JUMP") && !col.empty():
		vel.y = -200
	linear_velocity = vel

Yeah, that code might suck, first time I've tried moving something with input in Godot and didn't read any tutorials. But it works. I had to do manual acceleration there since it seems Godot's physics cancel out gravity when velocity is modified, while in Box2D (which I use) both can be used (setting velocity cancels out user accumulated force, but not gravity). Also my one had a second collider as a foot sensor (that's what the 2 in the getTouching call was specifying), I didn't add that to the Godot version.

I'll shut up about my thing now. :)

jbskaggs

@Kojack said: I don't want to mention non Godot stuff too much, but I thought I'd show a little example of my one. Here's is a very simplistic character controller with velocity based left/right movement and jumping when on the ground.
void Cat::update(float deltaT)
{
	b2Fixture* groundTouch = kage::Physics::getTouching(m_body, 2);
	auto vel = velocity();
	vel.x = 0;
	if (kage::Input::isKeyDown(sf::Keyboard::Left))
		vel.x = -4;
	if (kage::Input::isKeyDown(sf::Keyboard::Right))
		vel.x = 4;
	if (kage::Input::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Up) && groundTouch != NULL)
		vel.y = -8;
	velocity(vel);
}
and I (roughly) recreated it in Godot as:
func _process(delta):
	var col = get_colliding_bodies()
	var vel = linear_velocity
	vel.x=0
	vel.y+=200*delta
	if Input.is_action_pressed("LEFT"):
		vel.x = -100
	if Input.is_action_pressed("RIGHT"):
		vel.x = 100
	if Input.is_action_just_pressed("JUMP") && !col.empty():
		vel.y = -200
	linear_velocity = vel
Yeah, that code might suck, first time I've tried moving something with input in Godot and didn't read any tutorials. But it works. I had to do manual acceleration there since it seems Godot's physics cancel out gravity when velocity is modified, while in Box2D (which I use) both can be used (setting velocity cancels out user accumulated force, but not gravity). Also my one had a second collider as a foot sensor (that's what the 2 in the getTouching call was specifying), I didn't add that to the Godot version.

I'll shut up about my thing now. :)

This helps me with Godot as well. I am an old man and when I see these things it helps me to grow. For me to actually understand Godot I went from Gamemaker to Defold to Godot and I wrote an equivalency how to do the same thing in each - and that Rosetta Stone clarified Godot for me. Sometimes people dont realize how hard it is for others to learn. :)

cybereality

Well for players in Godot you would use a CharacterBody (and code the gravity yourself, but is handles collision). Or if you want to use a RigidBody, you want to avoid altering the linear velocity except at the start of the game or for specific things (like respawning objects). There are physics methods to add impulse or torque or whatever that don't conflict with the physics engine.

Kojack

Yep, I've seen mention of that. This was mainly to show a one to one of the code, that C++ isn't that much more complicated in this case.

fire7side

@Kojack said: Yep, I've seen mention of that. This was mainly to show a one to one of the code, that C++ isn't that much more complicated in this case.

That's mainly because you are using physics. The language isn't "that" bad, but memory management tends to lead to leaks and problems better left to someone other than a scripter that's trying to get a game out. Godot is written in c++. We're just doing the light lifting with gdscript. I don't need to do header files and all that garbage. It's like you have to repeat yourself every time you write code.

cybereality

@Kojack said: This was mainly to show a one to one of the code, that C++ isn't that much more complicated in this case. Not sure about that. This line is almost unreadable:
if (kage::Input::isKeyDown(sf::Keyboard::Left))
This looks like English:
if Input.is_action_pressed("LEFT"):

Kojack

@cybereality said:
@Kojack said: This was mainly to show a one to one of the code, that C++ isn't that much more complicated in this case. Not sure about that. This line is almost unreadable:
if (kage::Input::isKeyDown(sf::Keyboard::Left))
This looks like English:
if Input.is_action_pressed("LEFT"):

If I didn't prefer explicit namespace use, I could have done: if (isKeyDown(Left)) None of the double quotes, underscores, colons or dots of the Godot code. :)

Anyway, I'm curious why I've seen several times mentions of not doing velocity changes in Godot.

Having gone through Godot's physics source, the 2D physics system is a basic euler integrator. Accumulate force, combine with gravitymass, integrate velocity change, integrate position change. In fact the way the apply impulse you mentioned is implemented is: linear_velocity += p_impulse _inv_mass; It's also changing linear velocity outside of the integration step.

cybereality

It's because of when the physics code runs. I can't recall the details, but I think that integrate_forces() might happen before or after physics_process() (and out of sync with _process()) but not necessarily at the same time as the physics engine integrator. So you have 3 potential places where physics are being updated and if you do them in the wrong order then you are asking for trouble.

Kojack

In that case impulse based functions will have identical issues if it's due to execution order.

The 3D physics system might be different, I haven't gone through its code, just the 2D.

cybereality

No impulses have no problem, because they are not your code, they are methods that send into the physics engine.

Megalomaniak

Honestly my issue with languages like c/c++ has never been about the syntax. I just don't like to deal with linkers and precompilers. This is not to say that I don't prefer the syntax of gdscript tho, otherwise I'd just be using c# I guess.

cybereality

Yeah, the whole header and linker and compiler thing I find annoying. I wanted to post a screen shot of that Vulkan engine I made, I have the code on Git from a few years ago, but it would probably take me hours to find the right 3rd party libraries, right Vulkan SDK, update all the compiler/linker options, etc. It's a pain in the butt.

cybereality

I just released my latest demo, using Godot 4.0. Download today. https://cybereality.itch.io/aniela

Bimbam

If we griefing about languages, avoiding unnecessarily truncated/inconsistent command naming is big for me (and something I fail on in my own code), and probably why I like GDScript/Python's 'readable' mantra so much.

Bash is probably the worst offender for this. For example:

pwd = Print Work Directory Ok, sure. Makes sense....until
ls = "long listing" urgh ok? that loosely relate to it's function of 'print directory long file list', but shouldn't it be pdlfl if it aligned with pwd?
grep = Global Regular Expression Print Right so now the 'print' is at the end? And what does 'global' have to do with anything?? Also, the 'regular expression' is the pattern, so this command prints matching patterns??? Again if we try to simplify it's function into a sentence it would be something like 'Print Regular Expression String Match' or presm.

Of course no matter whether you use 'grep' or 'presm', you are still having to memorise an acronym that at a glance means absolutely nothing to a beginner. Having worked with some angry greybeard and senior devops types, I'm willing to bet an annoying amount of these past naming decision were unofficially made on the premise to 'put off' nooby beginners.

Conversely a 'friendly' language like powershell names its cmndlets in a mostly uniform, mostly consistent way: ls becomes Get-ChildItem pwd becomes Get-Location * grep becomes far less needed thanks to the object pipeline removing the ridiculous need to format string outputs from other commands to begin with... but also largely replaced by Select-String and -match operator.

DaveTheCoder

The Linux/Unix command names were created at a time when nobody used computers except programmers, who were typically using dumb terminals and 300 Baud modems connected to a mainframe computer, and minimizing keypresses was important. :wink:

cybereality

Yeah, I mean the ultimate thing would be if you could just speak to the computer in English (or your native language). Like you say "When I press the space bar, the player character jumps up 128 pixels". I mean, it's not so much of science fiction, we almost have the technology today.

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