UIBuzz - Software and game development

 Welcome to another episode of the UIBuzz Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast of PeterWitham.com. In this one, I wanna talk a little bit about doing 3D game development with G0dot. Now, I had not done 3D in Godot until recently, and I have to say. I'm really surprised.

And what I mean by that is, the only things I knew is what I'd read online. Which, hey, you can trust internet people, right? That's a thing, right? But seriously folks would say, oh. It's good, but it doesn't really have the performance of some of the other engines and you can't really do anything major with it.

But that has not been my experience. I have been working on a game that's got some, whatever you, I don't even know what you call it, filtering, post-processing, whatever on the screen with this 3D game and performance is. More than acceptable. Now, this is not a complex game by any stretch.

There's no massive, high polygon counts or massive models and levels and all of that kind of thing. But it is more than good enough. I would say actually without the overhead of some of those other bigger engines. I'm sure you know the ones, but I'm just curious because. I am really just liking this experience of doing this 3D in Godot.

It is a challenge for me because GDS script is still, it's not my thing in a big way, is what I mean. And so scripting a lot of this stuff for, putting 3D objects on a screen and movement and collisions and all that kind of stuff is still very new to me in GD script. But their performance is, like I say, more than acceptable.

And I, I really don't get what people are upset about. Or maybe it's just a case of, people have their favorite engines and that and they want to pick on the other ones, if in the playground as it were. Maybe it's something like that. I don't know. But all of this to me is suggesting I can totally do this The other interesting aspect of that is I did some modeling in Blender exported FBX files to move into Godot. Hey, it just worked. It was beautiful. It was fine. Yeah, some of the texturing was a bit weird, but hey, that's probably me. Now along with that though, I have a mountain of unity. Whatever you wanna call 'em.

Models, assets, whatever term you want to use. And I went through this process of trying some scripting and some other things and some plugins and all this kind of stuff to export those as packages from. Unity and importing that into Godot. And yeah, it's, it has been a mixed bag I've found.

That it'll bring the models in just fine. But more often than not, the texturing or the materials is messed up. Now, I know there are some commercial plugins out there that folks use. I have not tried those, but I'm very tempted to at this point because again, this is working out pretty good for me.

Now, the interesting thing as well is. The situations at the moment with lots of packages, assets and the whole Unity China situation where it's a case of hey, you can't get 'em anymore, but if you already bought them, you get access to them still, which is nice, but there won't be any future updates and all those kind of things which is, That's a whole other subject. I guess I just don't wanna get into that other than saying another unity messed up bag of nonsense, which is also why I was trying 3D in Godot. But I'm curious if folks have good experiences with, or workflows that you use. To export stuff from Unity as far as 3D models and packages and those kind of things, and bringing them into Godot.

I've done some research online, watched some great videos on YouTube about it as well. But like I say, I still had mixed results. There were some plugins out there. I'm not gonna name. Because I haven't tried them yet, but there was some out there that I'm sure you are familiar with, which is export from Unity to Godot or export from Unreal to Godot or Unity to Unreal and all those kind of things.

And they seem to cost around sort of 29, $30. I'm almost thinking at this point it might be worth trying it so that I can export a lot of these packages that I have that I know are on that list of the thousands of packages that won't be. Available in the sense of they're being removed from the store won't be updated and those kind of things because of this whole China Unity situation.

I have a ton of stuff that's on there. I actually suspect everybody has at least a few that are on there. 'cause the list is ridiculous. And so I want. Almost back them up locally by download, create a Unity project and download them, export them as a package, and I've got my own copy and life is great.

Don't care what happens with the Unity store at that point. Anyway, we'll see. Maybe I will, I don't know. $30 is one of those. Yeah, you could try it, but at the same time, should you, because it's $30, right? Anyway. Reach out to me, PeterWitham.com. If you've had experiences with those I'd love to have a conversation with you or if you wanna come on the podcast and talk about it too, that, that would be interesting.

I think I'm finding that there are people in this situation, there's always that thing, right? I need to get from engine A to engine B and what's the best way to do that, and all those kind of things. Then of course there is the licensing issues, but I know the stuff that I'm talking about is okay to use on other.

Engines because it's available on all the engines. But I just wanted to share my thoughts in this short episode. Hope to have this game wrapped up and at least testable by folks soon. But yeah, my, my experiences with Godot and 3D have been very favorable and I think I'm gonna keep pursuing it further.

Just to see how it works out. Certainly for smaller games, I do not see any performance issues whatsoever, be it on a desktop, a Mac pc, Linux, or even on a mobile tablet that's, of average power, let's say. I'm just not noticing any problems. That's it folks. Share your thoughts on, I'd love to hear from you.

Like I say, PeterWitham.com I'm gonna get some other episodes out soon. I've been working on a lot of game development recently, but I've also had an absolute mountain of work to get done in job Land as it were. So I need to catch up on episodes here. But that's it, folks. Have a great one.

I will speak to you next time.