this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Is it that hard for a group of devs to get together and build an Open Source alternative to Unity?
It's not, there is Godot https://github.com/godotengine/godot
Tho godot is majourly funded through grants right now (so they have some full time devs), shows how its even more important to donate!
Go is pretty dope to work with. There are a few other engine projects available too, like ebiten. https://ebitengine.org/
ebiten is closer to Love2d, SDL2 and GGEZ/Macroquad then Unity
It is difficult though. Godot has been in development since 2007. It was not FOSS until 2014. It is still way behind Unity and Unreal Engine in many ways, which have been around since 2004 and 1995 respectively.
As others pointed out, alternatives already exist. Besides Godot and ebiten, there's also Stride, which focuses on 3D.
Now, an Open Source alternative that is compatible with Unity, similar to what EnigmaGM offers as a counter to GameMaker (and, in a similar vein, FPC Lazarus vs. Embarcadero Delphi), would require a fuckload of work and people with the skills to make it work.
yes, game engines are highly complex programs with decades of development, problem solving, and bug squashing under their belt. Fortunately there's about to be high demand for a foss engine so I imagine Godot will get pretty good, but it's got a long way to go.
Just out of interest, what are the shortcomings of Godot?
As an avid godot dev, the only gripes that I've had with it are a) merge conflicts can be a nightmare (but you can use git unlike unity sooooooo) and b) it lacks some deep control, but I was just able to fork it and implement it myself lmao.
It's actually really polished imo. It's sleek, minimal (compared to the others in its weight class), only 100mb, and development is just accelerating.
What does "deep control" mean?
Things like oblique clipping planes for the camera's frustum. Basically something so specific and niche that it's kinda understandable that it's not a focus of the main engine.
Will you submit a pull request with your fork? Maybe other users could benefit from it
I've been using git with Unity for 6 years and it works fine. Merge conflicts with scenes are painful, sure, but I guess that's just the way it is. In my use-case there weren't many conflicts.
IIRC it doesn't have quite as much polish as Unity or Unreal, and last I researched, it doesn't run natively on Wayland (yet).
Yes, very much. Unity has an army of highly-paid developers, some of which are behemoths in the industry and built other highly-regarded technology. It could be done, I mean, I don't think Unity was particularly efficient spending its internal resources, but it is gonna take a while for other open-source engines like Godot to catch up.
For now. They've raised prices, next step is cost cutting. Lot of those devs might l could find other work and end up pushing a branch or two to Godot.
It's called Godot, and it's amazing.