blurymind
I am currently teaching myself Godot, and Godot's basic architecture using nodes is - dare I say it? - beautiful. The concept is very well thought out, and ideal for game development. Not only that, the one thing missing for me in Construct 2 is the lack of a decent "animate all" timeline. Godot has it. And so many other things.
Also, I just love how I can use Blender to animate 2d puppets, and the IK and animations are directly supported in Godot. And render 3d models to 2d sprites. Wonderful.
It might be one of the best 2d engines out there currently - but visual scripting is not part of it (yet). They are working on it, though. It's stunning that Godot is open source and free. But you are correct: Godot's language is easy to pick up.
I am unsure whether Scirra's decision to switch to a browser-based editor and completely rewrite it was such a good idea, but we'll see what we'll see. I keep saying I won't be part of it, because I am still terribly disappointed about their decision to go rental-only, and it really is a crying shame. I'd rather have preferred real improvements to the editor of Construct, such as a built-in animate-all timeline with graph editor control.
Luckily, with all the (free) alternatives currently available to 2d game developers, I certainly am not worrying about the future. Frustrated by the Scirra's rental model, though.
Godot 3 is coming on the horizon too you know - an alpha will be available in april <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_lol.gif" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing">
Juan (main dev) has been simplifying gdscript even more there - adopting ideas from game maker's gml, but still keeping the compatibility. The feature that most people are most excited about is the modern rewrite of the 3d rendering engine. I am personally excited about the inclusion of a spine2d like animation editing in godot3- with 2d mesh deformation.
Imagine spine2d being included in the editor- for free.
Right now gotod can already animate - right in the editor. However it only supports cutout animation. If construct3 had a built in animation editor with 2d mesh deformation support - I might buy that license. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_surprised.gif" alt=":o" title="Surprised">
Godot has visual scripting approach that is optional and is loosely based on the design of blueprints in Unreal. I personally do not like it and prefer to use gdscript, but that will perhaps start to change as they improve it.
But to improve it, people need to use it and submit feedback and reports to godot's github tracker!
I wanted to mention it in regards of ashley's bold statement that construct has more features because it exports just to the web. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_lol.gif" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing"> That is simply not true. Construct has a good visual scripting event sheet and a nice editor. But it is beaten in features by many other popular game engines (obviously unity and unreal there too, but also game maker) and all of those export to native.
Godot is quickly becoming popular, but as said before - you have to sit down and learn some python if you are serious about learning gdscipt. Gdscript looks very much like python.
Coursera actually has an excellent free course here:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/python
It is the best introduction to scripting that you will ever get imo and very quick to complete.
Godot's documentation and tutorials are also abundant.
In any case, I would love to see python like scripting in construct3 for plugins, but it looks like it will be using javascript.
I love python's syntax because it is clean and simple. Java script blows up in your face if you miss a bracket somewhere and has got some weird and annoying caveats, but am trying to learn it as well..
btw today clickteam announced that Fusion 3 will not only export to native platforms, but it will also be able to export to html5
http://www.clickteam.com/fusion-3-devel ... ?f3id=8904
They are taking the approach that godot is using for exporting native code games to html5- using emscripten
[quote:3f6scvia]Emscripten is a source-to-source compiler that takes something called LLVM bitcode and spits out javascript. Basically it allows us to compile Fusion 3 made games into javascript based games/apps with relatively little effort and with very high performance.
Won’t C++ compiled to Javascript be slow?
Not really. Emscripten compiles to a subset of Javascript called “asm.jsâ€. It is basically fully valid javascript but since only a specific subset of it is ever used it allows the browser to do some very aggressive optimizations on the code and even on-the-fly compile the code to native code for the platform you are running it on. This means that even though your game/app will go through a Javascript step it will “just be a phase†so to speak.
Pleople will still have the option to export to native android,win,linux,mac,ios - so no need for wrappers. If you however just want a web app/game - html5 is available. A lot of the other big game engines seem to be using emscripten for html5 export - Unreal and Unity included!
To put some light on the name of this thread - you should not be worried about the future. We have never before had it so good in terms of choice and quality of game engines. There is something for everyone <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">
The future is incredibly bright!