Modern C++ Won't Save Us (2019)

Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us (2019) by flohofwoe on Monday April 26, 2021 @05:22AM (#26940732)

As productive and useful as Godot is (it is an awesome engine), its design resembles game engines of the late 90s to early 2010s when OOP was all the rage. Back then, most game engines were written that way (lots of tiny heap-allocated objects, connected by shared pointers). It's really just since the 2010s that the CPU/memory gap is the main driving force of game engine design (which wasn't much of an issue in the late 90's).

On the other hand, many games don't need to juggle more than a few dozen to a few hundred dynamic instances of one "thing" (outside of the particle- and animation-systems at least), so for most games a modern ECS design is definitely overkill (except for some specific parts of the game). Providing a good "game building workflow" in the editor is definitely more important.

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Re:Modern C++ Won't Save Us (2019) by nightowl_games on Monday April 26, 2021 @01:39PM (#26945427)

Hey Floh, love your work! It's validating to hear you say these things. For me, the biggest annoyance with Godot's code base is the lack of clear ownership semantics (no use of smart pointers), and the use of fully hand rolled collection types for everything. It makes it hard to inspect variables in a debugger! Also the performance of the collection types are bad because of all the allocations. Seems like those problems will never get solved as it would be too expensive to rectify.

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