A New Open-Source Game Engine Being Released

[brosis]

For real, guys? Someone releases a high class game engine under a perfectly fine open source engine and all some here have to do is to complain about it not being (L)GPL?
It is really simple: If you have a problem with the MIT license then don't use this engine, in the same way that GPL proponents always say: "Hey, if you don't want your code to be forced to be GPL don't use GPLed code in it!".
In the meantime you are of course entitled to release your own code under whatever license you want, in the same way as Juan Linietsky can choose the license he wants to use.

Deal with it, can this go back to a discussion about thsi game engine and not become another pointless thread about which license some here prefer?

Juan Linietsky: Thanks for your work and thanks for making it open source, I hope we will see some great games made with it.

A perfectly fine opensource license is Apache license. It is not copyleft, it does not protect against license withdraw, but at least it gives some good structure and patent grants. Still, everyone is up to his own business and no one is compaining about it not being L/GPL - suggesting, discussing - yes, licenses, future feature plans, possible development hosting etc. It is forums, not source code tree, isn't it?

[brosis]

Ya, that stuff with Google is messed up, but also falls into what I meant by any licenses working for apps as long as the license choice work for the devs and their customers/users. Google's policies and activities are at odds with my privacy and beliefs so I choose to use their services and products as little as possible. A lot of people just don't care so they get away with it, and that is their choice just as it is my choice to avoid the mobile space and use Firefox as you do so I can use the extensions I both want and need. If Google are fine with shooting themselves in the foot and their customers keep allowing their rights to be eroded away, I am fine with that as long as I have viable alternatives. Most of my software choices tend to be open source, but I don't automatically discount a package just because it is closed source (even if I do turn most of it down, most of the time). Games are one of the main exceptions, where most of the games I have are purchased close source products.

Its all fine and sweet until you host a (closed source) server of the game you legally purchased, and someone does a remote execution on your machine via an unpatched, unsupported exploit (UT99,03,04 anyone?). Or it stops working with recent drivers and neither proprietary driver team, nor opensource team will ever bother to help, first not planning on due to its out of market, second ones due to its spilling obfuscated dump. I am not teaching anyone or suggesting my preference, I just also dislike dead modding and empty servers after n+1 iteration appears. Just nearly all open games since ages, still have players online (but building a clan and doing VPN might help here).

[GreatEmerald]

For real, guys? Someone releases a high class game engine under a perfectly fine open source engine and all some here have to do is to complain about it not being (L)GPL?

I don't see anyone complaining, either. Personally I'm just curious about why their choice was what it was.

[curaga]

No, it says that you must allow a minimum of 5 installs; there is no upper limit. MS are actually making sure that their customers can have their purchased apps on a reasonable minimum number of devices without facing extra charges or penalties. Not that I care for MS or have any plans of using any of their products, but that agreement is actually rather decent over all, even going as far as making special exceptions from some of the rules for FOSS software.

Hm, you're right. Legalese.

[Apopas]

What is the toolkit?

[Juan Linietsky]

What is the toolkit?

Godot uses it's own toolkit. In fact, the whole godot visual editor is programmed in Godot itself, using the C++ API. This is what ensures that the engine runs fine on every platform including Linux/X11.

The toolkit is more simlar to an OS toolkit than a game toolkit. It's very much like Qt and it's really, really powerful, supporting all sorts of controls, anchors and containers. Of course it also has a set of simplified controls for games.

It was complex initially because it was designed for an MMO, and was later used for audio applications, but then something interesting happened. That is, that having a complex toolkit integrated to the engine allowed teams to create content generation tools much more efficiently, while reusing game code.

For example, if you were using Unreal or Unity and wanted to make a complex map editor, with sections, event lists, dialogs, battle setup code, etc, the UI toolkits are much more basic, so it would be a lot more work. You could use Qt or another, better toolkit, but then you don't have access to engine datatypes and serialization code. In Godot, the toolkit is as optimal as using Qt or any modern toolkit, so making tools that use the same game datatypes and edits them is really easy and quick.

Here's a list of many UI toolkit nodes:

[Kristian Joensen]

How "noob" friendly is the level editor and what other kinds of editors are there(music, animation, scripting, physics, etc)?

[Juan Linietsky]

How "noob" friendly is the level editor and what other kinds of editors are there(music, animation, scripting, physics, etc)?

The 2D/level/animation editor so far is just a powerful general purpose editor. It has been used in several projects by:

1) Programmers, of course.
2) Animators to create really complex cut-out animation and UI Animations
3) Level designers to create levels
4) Game designers to adjust values of exported properties in nodes
5) Graphic designers to create user interfaces

So, it's really tested.

Adding music is just adding a StreamPlayer node to the scene and referencing a .ogg file.
Physics is just adding a RigidBody or StaticBody to the scene, and some collision shapes to it
Scripting is just a matter of selecting a node and pressing the script button, that creates a new one.

[Juan Linietsky]

Here's screenshots of the 2D editor editing different types of scenes and nodes.

This is a complex 2D cutout animation rig:


This is a tilemap:



This is a user interface:



Unlike other engines, Godot does not have special editing modes and screens. Everything is managed by plugins that know how to edit different types of nodes, so it's really easy to create custom editors and custom nodes using the plugin API.

For example, the 2D tile editor is a node of type TileMap, that stores and draws a tilemap. It is edited by another object, TileMapEditorPlugin, which becomes visible when a node of type TileMap is selected.

The animation player is a node of type AnimationPlayer, and the editor is a plugin, AnimationPlayerEditorPlugin.

This architecture allowed to extend and add plenty of features to the engine without bloat.

[Kristian Joensen]

Nice, thanks a lot for the replies