W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with Godot Engine

Re:W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with... by Kelteseth on Saturday December 09, 2023 @07:10AM (#38581278)

To replace Unity? Yes, and if there is something missing, you just clone Godot and fix it yourself. I can compile the whole engine in 2 minutes. There are currently some limitations for AAA games in the rendering pipeline, see Clay John's nice talk about this, from the last Godot con[1]. For example, at the company I work for we use Godot 4 to recreate Google Earth with OSM data :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW3IFMvDTCY

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Re:W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with... by dash2 on Saturday December 09, 2023 @07:14AM (#38581306)

> if there is something missing, you just clone Godot and fix it yourself

"just"?

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Re:W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with... by gkbrk on Saturday December 09, 2023 @08:20AM (#38581727)

Much easier than waiting for a suitable job opening at Unity, getting a job at Unity, and then just cloning Unity and fixing things yourself.

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Re:W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with... by Kelteseth on Saturday December 09, 2023 @07:22AM (#38581374)

Well, I mean source code is easier to read that Unreal. And Unity does not even provide source code, so you have to wait until they fix the issue for you. In addition, the Godot community is really helpful, if you provide an example project with your problem.

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Re:W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with... by Karliss on Saturday December 09, 2023 @09:54AM (#38582376)

Unity sells source code access, it's in the "contact us for quote" category. But that's how many B2B services work, including some of the most widely used commercial game middleware.

Also large portion of first party Unity subsystems which you install through builtin package manger (I am not talking about third party asset store stuff) is available in source code form under relatively nonrestrictive Unity Companion License to anyone. Don't need the Enterprise plan or additional payments for that. For those modules you can not only read and modify the source code, but you can even openly distribute your modified versions. The biggest restriction of this license is that you can only use that source code in combination with Unity, you can't port it to different engines. And in many cases where I read it, to better understand how to correctly use the library or avoid a bug, it was quite readable.

So overall access to source code isn't the main obstacle for game developers to fix the problem in Unity, spending time fixing things and afterwards maintaining a modified version is.

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Re:W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with... by lukeschlather on Saturday December 09, 2023 @11:18AM (#38583126)

I have personally had issues where I wanted to read the Unity source code but couldn't. And I suspect it wouldn't have been worth the cost in my case. There's really no substitute for shared source. Truly open source isn't necessarily better; modifying it is not often realistic, but having to pay just to read it is a big stumbling block.

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Re:W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with... by IshKebab on Saturday December 09, 2023 @10:37AM (#38582735)

Oh yeah, haven't you heard? All open source software is intrinsically flawless because you can just fork it.

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Re:W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development with... by fbdab103 on Saturday December 09, 2023 @12:51PM (#38583944)

I think patching a game engine is fairly common in the industry. Games are not on a dependency update treadmill. They pick a version, and barring some external crisis, there is no reason to upgrade anything ever. If there is one bug affecting rendering or speed from the underlying engine, it can be worth finding it yourself.

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