It's great that Godot was in a good place when Unity had its (inevitable?) implosion. Having used both engines I think they are comparable enough that Godot was a perfect fit for small indie and casual devs to move over to without having to learn a completely new workflow. If Godot hadn't been around I don't know where everyone would've migrated to.
I'd argue Unity's implosion was wholly evitable. All they had to do was announce, going forward, there would be different licensing. Big new version six months from now? Hey guess what, we'll do things differently from then on, so make your preparations accordingly. But no - they fucked over existing projects. They tried to retroactively interfere with the business decisions of games that were years into development.
Oracle only gets away with that shit because they're an eight-ton gorilla. And people still desperately look for the exits every time Larry Ellison announces a relicensing scheme based on how many computers you can think of.
Glad to see there are some level heads leading this project. Also great answer to how to pronounce it, the GIF creator should've gone for that instead of the pun.
Yeah except it's named after the play so it's definitely pronounced God-oh. I think people just mispronounce it Go-dot if they haven't heard of the play. Looking at you Mr Linus Tips.
but also the logo for the project is a robot so pronouncing it like that word makes sense and means it won't be confused with the play: ro-bot, go-dot.
From the article linked on this very post:
Those open source values even extend to how you pronounce the engine's name. We asked if Godot is pronounced "Go-dough," like the play, or "Go-dot."
"It's open source," Verschelde said with a grin. "Pronounce it however you like."
They're being diplomatic. From Wikipedia:
The name "Godot" was chosen due to its relation to Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but never will.
It's clear that it's named after the play. It's also clear that the devs really don't care how you say it.
Personally, I think I'll start doing god-ot, as in "got it".
“Go-dough,” like the play
"Like the play" - but where does the stress go? On the final syllable, as in French? (The play was originally written in French.) On the first syllable, as is more usual in British pronunciation of French words? (The author was Irish and apparently this is how he pronounced it - when speaking English.)
That's exactly the problem with prescriptive pronunciations -- they tend to break down depending on how narrow the transcription, which means they're arbitrary anyway.
If it is truly based on the play, then it would have to be /go.'do/, like the French.
/'go.do/ is indeed an anglicized pronunciation.
Source: am a professional linguist.
Edit: and we should not forget: all human language is ultimately arbitrary in terms of form, modulo limits of human articulation. This is often referred to as Saussure's Principle of Arbitrariness. Which is to say: no one should get bent out of shape about how people pronounce things. If the information transfer was successful, nothing else really matters from a linguistic standpoint.
That's partly what I myself tried to hint at with the question and the parenthetical remarks. Various forms have their own claims to "legitimacy".
And the whole issue somewhat surprised me, because I never even considered that there were these different pronunciations at all. I'm not a native English speaker, and I've always used a more French-like pronunciation of "Godot" that is used in my native language. I expected neither the inital stress nor the -ough diphthong in English, but a more French-like pronunciation. As much as I feel comfortable in English and use it every single day, some of these quirks in pronunciation can still catch me off-guard.
And its logo is a robot, so it isn't unreasonable to think it's go-dot
Unity was one of the first applications that made me take a good look at FOSS in general because my experience with it was:
"Hey let's make a game for our final project"
"Okay, let's try Unity"
Flashbanged in light mode
Dark Mode is only available for real cash money subscription license
"Yeah okay nvm let's try something open source lol"
Meanwhile in my engine's editor, the default is dark mode, with no plans on making light mode on my end.
They really paywalled dark mode? That move alone is incredibly dumb. Surefire way to alienate potential new users before they've even tested anything serious.
Used to. It took a single registry tweak to enable it which was easily found, but still a pain.
having to hack around your IDE for something that simple is a real bad sign
I'm building something heavily reliant on the physics engine. Unity you need to be an enterprise member for the ability to override methods related to physics. Easy choice
Is that why so many unity games have the same feel? I've started looking into the game engine that's used and avoiding unity games.
I can't say thats why, regardless of engine you're trying to solve basically the same problems, more likely which example project is used as a starter, which I'm sure very much the same can happen regardless of game engine.
With the FOSS spirit however Im sure more contributors will make plenty of viable starter asset packs for inexperienced users and diversify the "feel"
But I can say being able to actually interact with the phys engine is practically what's enabling my project, so I would imagine that also has a part in the feel of games
I've been with unity since the early days and back then it was this simple little engine.
Today it's a nightmare. I just made an hdr project and imported their own terrain example assets and guess what? It's broken in multiple ways. Now I have to waste time fixing it, instead of focusing on my project. And that's as a unity expert rather than a beginner.
That's not to mention all the errors it loves to throw at me, even though it's all quite vanilla. And how it loves to grab my attention with popup windows that block my view. How builds fail when I focus on another window. I could go on.
They keep adding features without finishing them. Clearly some kind of impulsive marketing behavior, rather than listening to the experts.
The cherry on top is that licensing nonsense they pulled, putting my hard earned livelihood in danger. That stuff really makes you scratch your head and look around.
Seriously, try out Godot.
Edit: I actually just realized I haven't even started yet with truly getting stuff off my chest here.
The pair said it was a major relief that the calamity came after version 4.0 of Godot was released in March of 2023. That version, they felt, was most ready for a sudden rush of new developers.
Sounds like they saw it coming for a long time and successfully prepared for it
No amount of precedent will get me to stop pronouncing it G'doh.
This isn't a Qt situation where the people who named it are objectively wrong about how those letters should get said. I just do not like any of the other options.
Wait, how is it supposed to be pronounced?
Qt? They insist it's "cute," which, no.
Godot? Don't care.
Always heard it pronouced "cute", how would you pronounce it ?
Cutie.
Because that's how it's fucking spelled.
Yeah. I just say qt as separate letters. Smh
Meanwhile I picked Defold as my engine of choice and absolutely love it.
Does 'it' mean Defold or the learning curve?
I meant Defold, though I picked it up pretty easily. That said, I had very limited programming experience. It might be different for people used to working with other engines.
Godot went from a promising but limited engine for hobbyists to the 2nd most popular engine for solo developers in about a year. We're even finally seeing high quality Godot 3D games releasing to Steam.
Give it a year or two and Godot might start to make headway into the established studios, too.
Unity's implosion has been amazing for loads of engines. other than Godot too. Bevy is making progress, and some of the biggest indies this year are on less known engines, like Balatro's Love engine
I’m not really surprised! It’s come a looooong way since 3.0, but I’m glad to hear that the newer users are understanding of the model. I guess we have Blender to thank for that
Few people get to choose their fate.
How do you guys pronounce it? Go-dot or guh-dough
god-oh with no stressed syllable, like a french person with that name might pronounce it
I was trying to remember the other game making programs other than Godot and unreal, I genuinely forgot about unity
It serves my purposes well enough, and I enjoy using it.
Welcome to the programming.dev Godot community!
This is a place where you can discuss about anything relating to the Godot game engine. Feel free to ask questions, post tutorials, show off your godot game, etc.
Make sure to follow the Godot CoC while chatting
We have a matrix room that can be used for chatting with other members of the community here
We have a four strike system in this community where you get warned the first time you break a rule, then given a week ban, then given a year ban, then a permanent ban. Certain actions may bypass this and go straight to permanent ban if severe enough and done with malicious intent