I think FreeOrion could benefit from being ported to Godot

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skyace65
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I think FreeOrion could benefit from being ported to Godot

#1 Post by skyace65 »

For those who don't know Godot is an open source game engine released under the MIT License, so it's usable for an open source game. In fact a few other open source game projects have already started to port to Godot, Battle for Wesnoth, Unknown Horizons, and Wyrmsun. The engine has been out for a while and its 2D tools are fairly mature, it also has a native 2D renderer, it's not flattening a 3D scene like Unity does.

So what are the benefits of porting FreeOrion to Godot? easy packaging for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Godot is an engine a lot of people already contribute to, so more time could be spent on programming gameplay for FreeOrion. And when PRs are made to the engine because FreeOrion needs something the engine gets better, which attracts more people, who make more PRs FreeOrion can benefit from. It's also somewhat well documented, it's not as big as Unity or Unreal but there are a few quality youtubers with good tutorials and the official site does have documentation.

Don't get me wrong, I understand this would take a while to accomplish since everyone's doing this in their free time. But I think the long term benefits outweigh the short term losses. I'm not a programmer or 2D artist, but if recreating the UI in Godot is what it takes to get this ball rolling then I'll do it to the best of my abilities.

Here's the official website: https://godotengine.org/

o01eg
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Re: I think FreeOrion could benefit from being ported to Godot

#2 Post by o01eg »

I suppose you could write alternative Godot-based client with boost serialization addon to have a network compatibility and boost parser addon to have a scripts compatibility.
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Vezzra
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Re: I think FreeOrion could benefit from being ported to Godot

#3 Post by Vezzra »

An open source, cross-platform Unity like engine as a foundation to build FO upon is something I actually have been wishing for, although not seriously. I just thought it would make certain things much easier, if FO were made with such an engine. A lot of low level UI/graphics stuff we need to take care of ourselves wouldn't be necessary, cross platform compatibility would be easier, as would probably be packaging and distributing.

I just took a quick glance following the link you provided, and I have to say, I'm impressed. Looks like Godot would fit that bill quite well. However, as far as I can judge this at all, it very much looks like we'd have to completely reimplement at least the client, which would be an enormous task. Considering that it took us over a decade and several generations of contributors to get to where we are now, oh boy, I wonder what it would take to accomplish that. It's hard to say, for me at least, but I think that endeavor would take us two to three years, and even that might be optimistic.

In the long run it probably would still be worth the effort, the problem is getting the team to commit to that task and see it through. Our mode of operation is (and has been for a long time, if not always) that contributors more or less work on what they enjoy working on, to keep themselves motivated. It is a hobby we all do for fun, after all. When we start a release cycle, we have some rough ideas what we want to tackle for the next release, but what actually happens more often than not turns out to be very different. That simply won't work when porting FO to Godot.

So, as much as I'd like to see FO using such an engine, and as good as it probably would be in the long run, I don't think we can pull that of.

Geoff? Just curious, what's your assessment of such an idea?

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adrian_broher
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Re: I think FreeOrion could benefit from being ported to Godot

#4 Post by adrian_broher »

Is this the bi-monthly "Lets change to technology $X because I like $X and $X is objectively and totally unbiased awesome? It only takes one rewrite to do so"-thread?
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: I think FreeOrion could benefit from being ported to Godot

#5 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Vezzra wrote: Sun Apr 21, 2019 5:57 pmGeoff? Just curious, what's your assessment of such an idea?
It would probably be nice to have done, but unless someone dedicates a lot of time to making it happen, largely on by their own effort and motivation, it's probably not going to happen any time soon. Various people get really motivated to do such things from time to time, though, so it's not impossible.

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Re: I think FreeOrion could benefit from being ported to Godot

#6 Post by charlieg »

Until somebody posts a proof of concept, it's only a dreamy idea.
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