Kinda. It depends.
There’s no best engine. Some engines fit your needs well and some don’t. I don’t know what you’re trying to make. People have been making games in godot. It’s possible. But you’re here reading a blog post about godot instead of making your game. Maybe you’re just looking for some more information. It’s fine.
Since we’re both here I might as well tell you about my experience with godot so far.
When I got into godot a year ago it was buggy and it was missing a lot of features. I was aware of that but the idea was to start learning and contributing to it while it’s maturing. By the time it’s ready I’d already know the engine well enough to do some cool shit with it.
I’ve been reporting bugs, testing PRs, opening small PRs myself during that time, doing whatever I could to help.
So, how good is it now?
Features
Surpisingly almost everything that was missing a year ago is either already merged or is being actively worked on to be merged soon. It’s actually kind of insane what people managed to achieve in that time.
Some of the things that were added are:
- Shader precompilation (PR)
- 3D interpolation (PR)
- Metal support. (PR) This solved some mac-specific bugs.
- d3d12 (PR)
- Decent 3D physics (jolt was usable as an extension but it’s now also in core in 4.4)
- Acyclic render graph (PR)
- Compositor effects (PR)
- 2D batching (PR)
- Motion blur. Compositor made it possible to make an addon. And it works really well.
- UIDs (PR, needed so that your project doesn’t break when you move files around)
- In-editor game mode (PR, feature is still WIP but should make it into 4.4)
- Editor buttons without an addon (PR)
- Feature-complete compatibility rendering (for web)
- JNLM denoiser (PR)
- SkeletonModifier3D (a new common type for IK, physics and other skeleton features)
- Interactive music (PR)
- Graph editor rework
In total over 7000 PRs got merged. A lot of improvements to lightmaps, GDScript, C#, XR, import pipeline, etc, way too many things to mention in a blog post. There are still some missing things that people might expect from a 3D game engine, like texture streaming, deferred renderer, better screen-space effects, etc. All planned.
If godot continues improving at this rate it will probably reach feature parity with Unity somewhere in the 4.5-4.6 dev cycle.
Stability
Rapid feature merges come at a price of stability. Godot depends on the community for testing because there’s no 💰 for a QA team.
Merging features first and stabilizing after is the right approach when the engine is in active development and is trying to catch up on features that people simply can’t use the engine without. When the engine is buggy it’s annoying. When the engine can’t do the thing that you need at all then it doesn’t even matter if it’s stable or not. So personally I wouldn’t have it any other way. It just needs to run its course.
But of course it means that for the time being there are plenty of bugs, even in stable versions. Crashes are uncommon and critical bugs get prioritized. But overall the engine is still somewhat rough around the edges, especially for 3D stuff.
Whether it’s time to get into godot depends mostly on how comfortable you are being an early adopter. Tinkering, reporting, searching for workarounds, all that. If that’s ok then now might be the perfect time to get into godot.
Priorities
There’s now a Priorities page which is sort of a conditional roadmap (that is to say things will happen if you contribute to help make them happen). Still plenty of things to implement and improve.
I’m personally really excited to see WebGPU on that list. It brings all of the fancy rendering features to the web. I like web because it’s the easiest distribution platform. It’s perfect for small games. It’s perfect for game jams because downloading exes from strangers is always a bit scary.