Can anyone that has experience working with game engines speak to the capability and quality of godot or luxe in relation to commercial game engines like Unity or Unreal?

I'm all for a free and open-source alternative game engine, but the commercial engines are quite battle tested, and I've always thought of game engines as highly complicated pieces of software that can easily go haywire. Can anyone speak to the quality of the architecture of godot? (or even open source game engines in general, game engines are a subject I presume most are ignorant to).

Unity and Unreal vs Godot

Unity and Unreal = Huge engine that can make life like multi-million dollar games. Can be overwhelming for small teams

Godot = Awesome engine where almost anyone can make a game quickly. Release a game in a week or you can work with a team for over a year with a polished game. Godot is the killer Indie Game Engine due to how easy it is to make a game but you can really get something that scales but it isn't as capable as Unity or Unreal.

Godot vs Luxe (Haven't programmed in Luxe yet) - Godot you really using a lot of menus to make your game, though you can now in Godot 3.0 do everything (mostly) code based now (Great thing in my opinion). Luxe seems to try and make it more code based with the ability to use menus and a API that will allow you to use almost any language (Though I think languages similar to Python with a ton of libraries might not be well suite for porting. I really think Racket would make a killer game scripting language if people will get over brackets.

I apologise that I still bring up this axe that I have to grind whenever Unity is discussed, but for years it has had a V-Sync bug that results in one core being maxed out in Linux. This is an energy waster, especially in the context of travelling with a laptop and wanting to spend an hour playing a really lightweight game like Desktop Dungeons on the train[0]. It also heats up my laptop, spins up the fans, so the battery drains even faster, there is more wear on the mechanical parts, and I'm sure the excessive heat doesn't help the battery lifetime.

The most painfully ironic example of a game that suffered from this is TIS-100, a game of optimising assembly for an imaginary ancient computer[1]. You can imagine how this completely ruined the immersion for me. I reported it to Zachtronics, and got a really swift reply. Maybe they managed to fix it since. All I know is that I'm happy that Shenzen IO used a custom engine.

Perhaps the bug is fixed in the newer versions in general, but I still see new Unity games come out that have this issue.

Until then, the workaround seems to be adding a manual VSync setting (Jazzpunk and Mousecraft both have this, and do not have this issue). So to any Unity developers out there, please add a vsync option. Not because you expect people to turn it off, but because making it a manual setting seems to fix this bug on Linux.

[0] http://www.desktopdungeons.net/

[1] http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/

A little off topic, but Racket is definitely used by Naughty Dog in their games. Here's a talk they did a while back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c

Given the history of Lisp & Naughty Dog, I wouldn't have expected anything else. Hadn't seen that video yet though, thank you!

Bennett Foddy (maker of, among other things, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and QWOP) said that he enjoyed porting QWOP to Luxe [0].

As somebody who has worked in Unity for a number of years, I am really excited to trying out the new engine. Unity is incredible for rapid prototyping and pretty good at making certain types of games, but there is a lot of bloat if you don't use all of their systems. Seeing something more modular is super exciting, and I can't wait to try it out.

[0] https://twitter.com/bfod/status/975492015860236288

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a great game for patient people. If you're the controller-throwing type it's not for you, but I've never understood that mentality to be honest.

Godot is more akin to GameMaker [0], and is quite easy to use. Think of it as an IDE aimed at making 2D games like platformers, RPGs, RTS or the like. There are several games made with both the above engines on Steam, mostly indie.

[0] https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker

That's not 100% true as of the Godot 3.0 release, though. They are trying to make PBR 3D a 1st class citizen of the engine and they're doing a very good job.

yea, there are several engines out there! It's great. I'm glad godot exists, the more usable engines around the better I say. (Although there are many reasons people choose to use godot (or other engines) to make games over another existing engine, similar reasons exist for why I make luxe for me to use!)

Also, MOAI - which is about to get a 2.0 release:

http://github.com/moai/moai-dev.git