What do you think of using Godot for non game apps? Like learning apps for kids,simulations, or data visualization for business with a lot of interaction?

not OP

I used it to build a multiplatform (including mobile) radio app similar to nightwave plaza (https://plaza.one/) and it worked remarkably well

also Pixelorama was built using Godot

https://github.com/Orama-Interactive/Pixelorama

Godot is a pretty good cross platform C++ framework for lots of things. I think it's probably competitive with the heavy hitters (QT, GTK, React Native) for certain application designs. The visual editor for laying out UIs is a pretty killer feature. GDScript is honestly a pretty killer feature (hot reload, super easy to write, the documentation is built into the editor, available offline).

Hey so I was trying to make a Stick Fight clone with my son. I got a good start but what I was really interested was the skeletal system for physics so I could try to really emulate it.

Do you have any thoughts on the skeletal system and has it improved in Godot 4? I sort of got it to eventually work, but it was really tedious. Have you ever used it and do you know if it has improved in 4.0 that makes it more viable to use?

I have a lot of experience messing around with these. It looks unchanged from godot 3.5 to 4.0 for the skeleton things. I actually wound up writing my own, which just copies rigid bodies matrix to each bone manually using gdscript.

Haven't used it. The system itself might be decent but the editor for it is probably bad. Lots of things in Godot like that.

We bought a license to Spine from http://esotericsoftware.com/

It has a godot runtime SDK.

What are your thoughts on GDScript? The reason I ask is I do a lot of work with Python these days and I like it most of the time. So I've been curious about a high level dynamic typed language for game dev. I have played around with Unity in the past and picked Unreal for my current project this time but kinda regretting that. I'm not doing anything technically impressive so I thought blueprints would help speed things up but I'm less than impressed.

GDScript is awesome to use from a developer experience perspective. The documentation for everything being built into the editor (F1!) is pretty awesome. The api that is provided to GDScript for everything from strings to file operations to url requests is pretty great.

That being said, GDScript has some flaws: it's performance is bad, the typing system needs work, it doesnt allow cyclical references of classes and the coroutine API is not greatly designed.

But for prototyping game code it's pretty hard to beat for developer speed.

For UI code it's top tier.

Fortunately, those concerns are all, if not fixed, then much improved in Godot 4. Just a couple weeks ago, they increased GDScript 2.0 perf by a lot, the type system is much more present (typed arrays, real enums, exported custom resources), cyclical references got merged in a month or two ago, and they've done some work on coroutines with the new await syntax.

I'm looking forward to 4.0 coming out (well, 4.1) when they go back to smaller incremental updates and a higher focus on stability, so I can start using it for more projects. If the web builds weren't so broken I would have used it for ludem dare this month, but I went back to 3.5 and sorely missed the new features.

They recently posted a forward looking article about what key features 4 is still missing: https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-a...

Maybe some of that comes in 4.x work, maybe some has to wait until 5. Most of it sounds like feature additions instead of things that require rewrites of existing 4.0 code.

If I was triple A I'd still consider Godot.

It wouldnt be hard for a AAA shop to use Godot for the editor and use GDScript to build UIs, VFX (visual effects) and DSL (domain specific language) type stuff.

Writing all your simulation and netcode logic in c++ makes 'godot' pretty unlimited.

AAA would want to completely replace Godot's renderer, but that is 100% feasible for a big studio with talented graphics engineers.