My Godot's dream

uriel

Hi Godoters, i wanted to say first thanks to Juan Linietsky and Ariel Manzur for their excellent work ! nice piece of software.

Discovering the engine within the community i spent most of my time on various plateforms, discord, this forum, the faq,etc... and i found here a new home, full of people who want to learn and share the knowledge... Open source is a strong force when it comes to educational purpose, thanks to you, guys, it is wonderful! Within a couple of weeks, i have been able to produce various mini apps that actually works ! (i am coming from other game engines and the learning curve was not so easy)

Starting real projects, personal and professional ones Straight away after the basics, i did diving into more specific features and start to improve my skills, again, with the help of the community, accessing various piece of codes in the asset manager and updating some of the available addons for my own purpose. and i promise myself, that apart my professional tasks and products, i will share all my experience and scripts to whom may interested. The community is excellent and the "vibe" is something i was looking for. i had promoting open source from 20 years all over the world, universities and offices, spending most of my time argumenting that open source is a kind of mentality that can save the world, when it is honest and free from capitalist interest...

To be more precise, i am talking of the environment of developpers and artists, around the software, NOT the final production (in this case, final games). Of course, we all need to work to get something to eat at the end of the month, but this is the result of work that cannot be done by the community, but by the creator himself.

Open source as Free ($), Freedom and Free spirit... I want to share also my point of view over the last 5 years, and the transformation of some other communities (i will not nammed any here but you may know them). i just make a suggestion for those who want to see the difference of open source and fake ... maybe we have to take care to not fall into the trap.

i have been active for about 20 years in a community supporting the best 3d software in the world (:D), and from the beginning, it was very good to share and progress together within the other members, everything was done to support everyone making money with their animations, 3d arts, etc..., far from the interest of making money within the open source app and far from taking money from the community users, and it was awesome ! i mean, we did helping everyone and by the time, the new users became advanced and teach others to join the group of pro users (i did personnaly support hundread of them that are now 3d animation teachers and i am proud of that, my heart is happy)

what i want to say, is that from 5 years, more or less, people start to create a "market", arount the community scripts and codes... and this is so dangerous that you may find today hard to get some help on the forum, and there is a big gap between pro users and noobs (without critics for them.. as i was at the beginning). And that is intolerable ! insupportable ! and this is making me so sad to look at this. the worse is that people who are making profit over the community have found an argument "everything has to be paid, nothing is free in the world, blablabla", and even insult community users or try to desesperate them creating free contents or scripts.

by the time, i have found my interest for this community lying down on the ground, close to death, due to these dangerous arguments, in the open source world. Something is wrong. i cannot understand how people can lie to themselves up to this point !

At final, and my hope for Godot's community and open source in general As i devote myself today again to this community, i do enjoy it so much, i do like the software too, i consider putting my time in it, helping the dev, helping the noobs and sharing the app around me. i hope that nothing like this will happend here, NO market place for scripts and community assets! Please

thank you for reading up to the end my long comment, but i feel that something have to be done before it is too late. If we want GODOT the strongest software for game/app creation, we have to take care of the community and its members.

Thats all guys, Have a great day, Enjoy godot and dont forget the creators of this software, they did sharing their work, even if it was a lot of time ! you cannot buy/sell everything in this world, when it comes to learn and progress together. Thx

amisner2k

Bravo Uriel!

I too recently became enamored with Godot. This engine has incredible potential and the more I play around with it the more I enjoy it. I share your vision and hope and also agree that taking care of the community is very important and I look forward to thoughtful discussions and productive contributions to this wonderful project in the near future.

Reading your post was a delight and I want to personally express my fondest appreciation for you taking the time to post it.

Take care my friend. - Aaron

Schuster

Hello,.....so strong read!....I think...when you create something for free and the others has an experience /joy or learns something.....so it is humanity....that soul within us.....I've been with this community for about four years now and it's getting bigger and the Godot engine is getting better .....so you're right there is the potential danger of commercializing the community but i believe this community is strong, amazing full of great creative people who love open source projects.....i'm so glad to be in such a great community for so long. @uriel ....you are a great member of this community!

MagicMike

Yes. Open source is the future, we are stronger together than apart.

This is why Google was smart enough to create Android as open source, to ensure it survives a long time.

Paid systems often grow faster in the beginning because of the money. However, also because of the money there are less eyeballs on the code, even if the paid system is open source. This leads to a faster rate of code rot, which eventually slows down code expansion and leads to the death of the project as it can no longer compete.

Because systems that are both open source and free, have maximum potential eyeballs on the code, they are not subject to the same rate of code rot and have much longer lifespans than paid systems.

These growth curves are the reason that in the beginning the internet was mostly full of closed source systems, and now as time has progressed we are beginning to see those systems die and we are seeing the birth of free open source systems which will long outlive the paid ones.

This is why, taking the time to learn a paid system over a free open source one, is a very poor decision this day and age.

Looking at the the image below of google trends for the search term "Godot" specified to the "game engine" category, we can see interest has a doubling time of approximately 12 months, although there are other potential interpretations of this growth.

If you search google trends for Unity or Unreal game engine, arguable the current biggest game engines in the industry, you can see that interest in both engines has been in steady decline since 2015. This is not a coincidence but a part of the natural progression of information technology.

Given that phenomenon such as code rot and social based growth operate on non-linear exponential curves it is difficult to pin down the exact date of death for these larger paid engines and systems, but at this day and age the writing is on the wall.

Glad to join you guys in the community.