i've been working on a FEAR-like for a while (since around july of last year, on and off) with a crew of artists. it has been fun figuring out a new FPS engine, but also annoying. you know, normal gamedev stuff. here's a funny render (i would put a webm video here but i can't! and also it's very debuggy!)
we were having level design problems because this is a classic-style FPS and we didn't want to place everything in the world as custom props or one big nightmare blender megamap - the art pipeline for such a thing stinks imo! where did we go so wrong as an industry! - so we're now using trenchbroom + func_godot to do our mapping. it's good, really activates my nostalgia neurons.
I've been working on a Godot project recently, but one thing I am kinda curious about is, like - is there a good source for finding Godot packages/plugins that are battle-tested and broadly fit for purpose? The asset library seems very wild-west, but clearly there is good stuff (like func_godot!) out there, and I'd like to be employing it (not func_godot, I mean, but things that are more appropriate for the project I'm doing) instead of reimplementing things that are already out there somewhere.
to be honest i mostly just search the godot reddit to see if anybody links plugins related to a specific need i have - in this case, classic-style mapping. i settled on func_godot actually because it's the latest in an iteration of existing map tools formerly known as Qodot
Oh, I guess we should keep Learnings here for future reference. So, uhhh, any (mercifully small, thusfar, but I'm sure I'll find some bigger ones in due time...) footguns I couldn't find documentation on that I've run into and someone might benefit from seeing some day:
C# codegen will choke (with an error message that doesn't actually explain what you did wrong) if you have a C# class with a field named @class. Solution: don't do that.
Getting custom tile data at runtime is miserably slow; you won't notice this if you're only checking a few tiles at a time, but if you need to grab large amounts of arbitrary custom tile data at once (I was doing Fire Emblem-like terrain attributes, so I needed to grab the custom data w/ the tile attributes in it for the entire area I was searching when doing pathfinding!) it will cause significant performance degradation. Solution: asynchronously cache any custom data where you're going to be querying it over a large portion of the map in a lower-level data structure ahead of time, so that you can just get it from the cache instead. (The solution is sort of intuitively obvious once you're aware of the problem, I mean, but hey.)
I'm still in "following tutorials" mode but I'm enjoying godot so far! I'm going to be using it for my side project
I love open source!! I'm glad I at least have experience using Unity, makes it feel less intimidating overall. (Not that I ever did much programming in Unity, I mostly just interfaced with plugging things into menus made by the actual programmers on the projects.)
I am looking forward to gaining more confidence in my programming though, it'd really be a useful skill to have on other people's projects, even if it just means "knowing how to communicate with the programmers more clearly about what I need"
