Really excited for Godot 3. I checked out the latest build recently, and noticed that the default 3D environment had changed; a nice open area is there by default, instead of just the default gray background, which makes it feel a lot more welcoming, professional and A E S T H E T I C. More: on a whim, I decided to try to fly through the scene using right-click and WSAD as is possible in Unity and Unreal, and to my surprise such functionality was implemented. It makes Godot so much easier to work with in 3D, as that's primarily how I would move around my scenes in the other engines; before you'd need to try to adjust your panning, then your zoom, and maybe you'd rotate around the proper point and maybe you wouldn't, it was a bit of a mess. It's still a little janky--rotation speed is very high at the moment and I turn way faster than I'd like, but that it's even present is a welcome addition. You can even speed up flight speed by holding shift. The devs are doing a great job!
Visual script is an interesting addition, though I can't see myself using it over gdscript; I know UE4 has a visual scripting language that more graphically-oriented people preferred to C++ programming, and I did get competent at using that to make some gameplay functionality in UE4. However, I only did this because there was no in-between scripting language like there is in Godot; in UE4 you had either C++ or visual scripting and no in-between, and I really didn't want to go through the headache of figuring out UC++ just to implement gameplay functionality--nor do they encourage it anyway, you're expected to use VS to pull off gameplay logic. Euch! Well, I'm certain there are lots of people who will be drawn to using visual scripting, though it's much slower to use that in lieu of regular scripting; it at least doubled my time spent scripting IIRC, with the additional time being spent either finding the right nodes to do the task I'd like (you want multiplication?--well better find the right node for the right kind of multiplication, can't just type an asterisk), or spent making the node graphs look pretty because it was so easy to make your script difficult to read what with a node for literally every operation taking up huge chunks of screen space. I hope Godot 3 manages to find a better solution to how UE4 implemented visual scripting, though with what I played with thus far, it seems that it'll be the same problem. Perhaps it's just inherent in visual scripting that it takes up loads of space. But hey, at least there's options.
I'm interested to see what they figure out for a type-safe scripting lango. I've heard talks of C# being strongly considered, and that'd certainly be a welcome addition for those with a Unity background (such as myself), but I've become quite accustomed to quack typing and I don't think I miss having to implement interfaces just to get common functionality that's offered by default in gdscript; after all, scripting languages are supposed to be simpler as their tasks are largely for gameplay logic, which shouldn't take so much design groundwork to pull off. I don't miss Unity's way of doing things, it gives me a headache thinking about how much more complicated things needed to be. What I do miss is knowing what types I'm working with at any given time, and consequently how Godot's intellisense tends to break on certain conditions, such as any function parameter; if it was clear what type a variable was I could get some intellihelp at any moment. Sometimes I just wanna know what in particular a function needs to work, and sometimes I'm not satisfied with being told that a function returns a variable of type "Variant". What is type Variant? It's not helpful to me to hear this!--so then I gotta print out the object's type in the console to see what I'm actually handling. It's just a little too loosey-goosey for my tastes.
Anyway I'm interested to see how Godot 3 progresses. I think I'll donate soon to help smooth things along.
