Indie game developer, procedural generation enthusiast, Dane in Finland. I barely use this account. Find me at π¦@runevision.bsky.social and on πmastodon.
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ALT Gamedev (holding up Godot robot head in the air): "Let's make Godot the Blender of game engines!" Blender (peeking out behind the gamedev's back): "You know, I do have my own game eng-" Gamedev: "Shut up, Blender"
ALT Sam: Here's a list of all methods which return some type of array. Some of these are hot path methods. Juan: Returning or passing arrays is fine. Normally these are not hot paths. Sam: The problem with Godot arrays in C# is that they're still classes, so every return creates garbage, and garbage collection can cause dropped frames. From Unity, my standard rule is zero garbage in a frame. Juan: No hot path relies on returning arrays currently. I understand the obsession with the GC in C# but a couple hundred pointers freed per frame is fine. The priority is to only have the critical paths covered with a non-allocation policy.
ALT Sam: If we have a good pattern for doing zero allocations, that should probably be done everywhere whether or not it's significant. I'm a little uncomfortable with the engine making judgements about which methods are hot path and which aren't - users will find unanticipated hot path use-cases for things. Juan: To me this is solutions in search of a problem. The advantage of the current API is that itβs exposed in a very simple and predictable way. It's very difficult to write software based on speculation on what will be best and what will be fast, or even based on benchmarks that don't have any real-world usage scenario behind them.β¨β¨It's easier to write software to react to real-world bottlenecks. As an example, the current ray_cast function you found was indeed slow, but thousands of Godot games have been published to Steam with Godot and nobody ever complained. This means no one used it as much as you intended it to. Now that you stumbled into this problem, there is more motivatio
ALT Sam: How will these things get fixed once a real-world performance problem is found? Is the API going to get a breaking change? If not, the fix we end up with will be a little messy. Juan: Probably going to be a two-fold fix. The current function remains in compatibility API but deprecated. Sam: This would be a strong argument in favor of caring about the performance of every method up front, whether or not it's anticipated to be important - nobody wants to be in the ugly position of having to try to fix it after the fact. Juan: Absolutely not. I will insist your view is extremely misled because you are not familiar with the source code. Godot is a gigantic codebase and optimizing everything that exists for the sake of it is not only a large waste of effort and time, but it results in far more complex and difficult to maintain code. As such, only the performance critical areas get performance critical optimizations.
ALT Sam: Could you define what you mean by hot path? In games I think most of us (certainly I) take it to mean anything that might be called even once in a typical frame. Juan: In this context, hot path is something you call hundreds to thousands of times in a frame. Even having a few hundreds of memory allocation is not going to put any sweat into the GC. Sam: I think you will find that these performance philosophies are considered unacceptable by many Unity devs. I don't know whether you care about catering to them - perhaps they're just not your target audience, and that's absolutely fine. Juan: The general idea behind Godot development is fixing real problems people have, not catering to people with a specific philosophy or that speculates about potential problems they don't actually have. If simply they come to us with the speculation that something is a problem, then nothing is done from our side. Development is very pragmatic in this sense.
ALT A picture of the Unity logo, with the text 'unity' replaced with 'irony', in reference to its merger with the adware company ironSource.
ALT Two approximations of the head of a femur. A is plain Marching Cubes. B uses the compact isocontours technique and as a result doesn't have small thin triangles, but rather a more uniform triangle distribution.
ALT Graph that has gross revenue per install in USD as Y axis and number of installs as X axis. Multiple colored contour lines show where the percentage of gross revenue owed to Unity passes various thresholds: 0%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 100% and 200%.
ALT A star shape silhouette to the left and the signed distance field generated from it to the right.
ALT A 2x2 table where the bottom row is YES to "Charges pros a cut of their success" and the right column is YES to "Charges pros a flat rate up-front". Top-left is Godot "Free and open source", top-right is the old Unity logo "No royalties, no fucking around", bottom-left is Unreal "Epic succeeds when our partners succeed", and bottom-right is the new Unity logo "We apologize for the confusion and angst".
ALT Graph that has gross revenue per install in USD as Y axis and number of installs as X axis. Multiple colored contour lines show where the percentage of gross revenue owed to Unity passes various thresholds.
ALT Thomas Petersen: Unity has been on a spiral since about 2020. The problem is that the promise of backwards compatibility and a rickety foundation makes it insanely expensive to create anything in Unity. You have to fortify your work with a mountain of tests, which are additional dependencies. Jem Cope: Do you have some idea of how you wish they'd solve this problem? Thomas Petersen: We were doing it with unity 7. New content pipeline, the very root of what unity is and the results were shown at unite. Async loading, no more progress bars, fully integrated ECS (3 lines of code, no joke!). Unbelievable gains for developers.
ALT SnowOrShine: When you say "were" Are Unity still planning to follow through on all/most of the features in the Unite keynote presentation from a month or so ago? (Because it looked like the changes would fix a lot of issues I currently have with the engine, nested prefabs, split render pipelines, entities/gameobjects being too separate etc) Thomas Petersen: No idea. I was terminated without given a reason the day after a strategy kickoff where the CEO said he doesn't believe in breaking change unity 7. I said we have to do that to make these things real. Out I went.
ALT Vertical cover art for Eye of the Temple.
ALT Screenshot from Unity promotional video, showing the text: "When created, when played, every game will be touched by AI".
ALT Picture of a cake with an edible print on top featuring Eye of the Temple's cover art, and frosting on the sides. Also on the table are some grapes, strawberries, chips and salted almonds.
ALT A yellow box labeled "Generative Systems" has arrows to two boxes below, a green one labeled "Procedural Generation" and a blue one labeled "Generative AI". Generative Systems: Creating something using any autonomous system. Procedural Generation: Creating something using algorithms (procedures) tailored to the subject matter. Capabilities primarily determined by: The rules and logic of the procedure Generative AI: Creating something using statistical AI models trained on input training data. Capabilities primarily determined by: The nature of the training data There is further discussion below the boxes of how procedural generation differ from generative AI. The full text could not fit here.
ALT creatures from prototype -> replace with 3D procedural creatures -> put into procedural terrain
