Godot Game Engine Released Under MIT License

goruka writes with news that a new game engine has been made available to Free Software developers under the permissive MIT license "Godot is a fully featured, open source, MIT licensed, game engine. It focuses on having great tools, and a visual oriented workflow that can deploy to PC, Mobile and Web platforms with no hassle. The editor, language and APIs are feature rich, yet simple to learn. Godot was born as an in-house engine, and was used to publish several work-for-hire commercial titles. With more than half a million lines of code, Godot is one of the most complex Open Source game engines at the moment, and one of the largest commitments to open source software in recent years. It allows developers to make games under Linux (and other unix variants), Windows and OSX." The source is available via Github, and, according to Phoronix, it's about as featureful as the Unity engine.

Re:Lets define our own string, vector, list classe

[goruka]

This is an easy answer, STL is good but often not as good, specially for projects this size and requirements because:

1- It generates huge debugging symbols.
2- It generates a lot of code because most compilers inline it by default.
3- It's so complex that compile time increases by a few times.
4- Errors are huge and uncomprehensible.
5- Support for custom allocators is limited to alloc/dealloc functions.
6- Support across compilers is not as good (specially console compilers).
7- Lack of support for COW with atomic ops for thread safety

Some of these probably improved significantly since the time work on the engine started, but I'm sure most issues still stand.

As for why not std::string or std::wstring, have you actually used those? They suck, the amount of operations you can do is really little, check core/ustring.h in Godot to std::string and you'll easily see why everyone rewrites the string class.

Re:Is this like CrystalSpace?

[exomondo]

They still exist, but are often used for student projects and tech demos. Building the game engine and the associated tech demos to show it off is the (relatively) easy part. Creating a decent game with proper art assets, animation, music, voice actors, level design and a good storyline with well-developed characters is the hard part. It requires a lot more effort than collaboratively building application middleware and many studios prefer to use proven commercial engines like UE, iD tech, CryEngine, Source, etc... that are artifacts of actually building a commercial game rather than building just an engine.

I'm not saying these things are essential for all games but often for notable ones and in the case of simple games it is often not worth the effort to learn/use an engine that has so many features you aren't going to need.

According to..?

[Bogtha]

according to Phoronix, it's about as featureful as the Unity engine

From the article:

The tech has now proven to be quite mature and is now very complete and according to its developer to be on-par with Unity, or arguably superior to Unity when it comes to the area of 2D and animation support.

Phoronix was just repeating the developer's claim. Would anybody who isn't the engine's developer care to comment on its feature parity with Unity?