australian video game developer. worked on many games. usually credited as something like “systems designer” or “technical designer”. right now, “senior technical designer” at riffraff games. also i make tools and tutorials and resources and stuff. expert in the use of the unreal engine.
I’m considering moving to the Doom 3 engine from Godot. Do you think that’s a good idea?
An interesting question… there’s a lot I don’t purport to know about both engines (especially Godot), so I don’t want to weigh in too hard, but I will throw out some observations:
If you did want to make a standalone Doom 3 project, Brendon Chung has a Standalone Doom 3 Game Starter Kit. This is the Skin Deep fella.
I have my reservations about Godot in general: like Unity, it just isn’t what I think of as a game engine; the Godot people are not invested in making their own games using it in a way that forces them to keep it solid all the way through. A lot of people don’t care about that though.
But, Godot gets a lot of active development. It looks to be substantially better year-on-year. But, inevitably the most catastrophic issues you encounter with any engine are going to be encountered towards the end of your dev process, when you’re trying to ship, because most projects don’t get that far. Do the cool new features coming in actually represent something you could really genuinely actually ship a reliable product with? Probably some, probably not all? I don’t purport to know.
On the other hand, Doom 3 is obviously not actively developed anymore at all. People add cool stuff to it, people overhaul the lighting and rendering and whatever, but in a way that is reliable? I don’t purport to know. Blendo proves, at least, that you can certainly ship a totally working D3 game today with a bunch of modern features and that’s fine. On Windows, anyway?
Can you do a console release, though? That seems like it might be a lot of work that no other engine would require you to do.
Console support on Godot is also famously fraught, but probably not in a “you just can’t” way; more of a financial and contractual clusterfuck way. Has anyone done the work of putting Doom 3 on Switch 2 or PS5? Maybe? Can you legally use that code in a commercial product? I don’t purport to know.
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