The same day that Unity confused all their developers with a new pay per user install revenue model, the team behind the open source Godot Engine just announced their new Godot Development Fund.
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/ - direct link to the original post, for anyone who don’t want to read a third party article.
Thank you, kind stranger
Okay, I never really looked into Godot, so I knew nothing about it.
Nice to see that it not only supports C++ and C#, offers a python inspired GDScript language, but allows community bindings for other languages. It’s nice to see there are already community bindings for Rust, Python, Javascript, etc.
but allows community bindings for other languages.
The bindings in 3.X were in a really good state even for niche languages, 4.X introduced a new system that threw that out the window as all bindings needed to be redone as a new effort.
More integration was needed for compiled languages, but it kinda sucks that the language I want to use (that was listed as production-ready for 3.X) still isn’t an option more than half-a-year after 4.0 released (and still only splintered efforts by individuals).
Which language?
Nim-lang. Python-esque style but compiled, having performance and high flexibility. Here’s an image with some code in it (non-Godot) (Note: reading from text grid) and here’s an example project (number converter) I made for 3.X (go to /src/ for actual code, main.nim and convert.nim).
Probably lends itself to gamedev (particularly highly tunable yet optional memory management, arc/orc likely what most want).
Note that this likely could have been guessed via this list as C# is obviously not it, Rust and Lua have 4.X bindings, so that only leaves 3 options in the production-ready category (and the other 2 are JS/TS).
Thanks. Very interesting
Well, Godot is getting a lot of press right now.
Hopefully it leads to not just more people using it, but more developers working on it, improving the ecosystem, and hopefully the bindings as well.
Possibly, but the most expected immediate direction (both for new contributors and the existing Godot team) due to the current situation is likely improving (or simply using) C# support over any bindings.
In my case, people interested in the same language might actually switch over to Unreal instead (as it does have a language-support plugin). That and I think it’s just a tall order to create bindings from scratch especially for 1 person, maybe even a year-long task so kinda sucks the 3.X bindings got broke (still seems odd to me that those devs weren’t/still-aren’t interested in 4.X).
It’s also possible that even the newer bindings require specific knowledge of Godot’s system (also maybe a bit of C/C++ knowledge) resulting in less people able to understand enough to even start creating bindings.
I mean I’m sure there will be an ecosystem change (beyond C#) because of this, but it’ll probably have more effect longer-term (if Unity can’t figure out how to dig upwards).
