Why I'm Moving To Godot In 2025
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- Опубліковано 7 лют 2025
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After years spent in Unity I have finally made the decision to move to Godot starting next year.
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Music:
Afternoon Break - Persona 3 OST
Signs Of Love - Persona 4 OST
Junes Theme - Persona 4 OST
In A Moment's Time - Skullgirls OST
Midori Eyes - Paradise Killer OST
During The Test - Persona 3 OST
Ode To Heroes - Metaphor Refantazio OST
Thanks for watching!
This video is dedicated to my friend, Alotryx.
#acerola #gamedev #unity3d #godot #shaders
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happy new year
Seeing you move to godot sparks so much potential in the engine for me, I'm excited to see all that can be done!
happy new year acerola 🎉🎉🎉
Very classy outfit 👍
I'm a software engineer that was working with web dev for a few years. Started learning game dev a month ago, and it was the most enjoyment I had in a very long time. Thanks for the great content.
@Acerola_t for sharing/exporting: You can export a packed scene that others can import as a node into their project
Learning is not only fun, it's also way cooler than not learning things
Learning is one of my hobbies fr, i love it so much
learning is painful as fuck though and takes the time you could spend reading books or playing video games
@@gagaxueguzheng Combine hobbies by making a Warhammer calculator or art in Blender etc.
How to learn? I am bad at it.
@@gagaxueguzheng Combine hobbies. Why'd my comment with examples disappear?
but acerola...
nice!
your posts have been a great inspiration for the decision to move thanks goat
🍻
You are one of the most inspiring godot and blender users for me and my best friend. Thank you!
we're about to witness even more godot shader magic and visual effects rituals than what you yourself can summon
When I grow up I want to become a passivestar! Both of you doing Godot stuff is honestly great news.
But Acerola... You're unironically building the modern Godot shader library on your own! Doing God's work here man, thanks for the hard work.
There’s an entire site with shaders for Godot.. it’s called ‘Godot shaders’.
Doing God(ot)'s work
@@hundvd_7 both can be true..
@@hundvd_7 beat me to it
@@hundvd_7 Considering it's open source we are all Godot
I look forward to seeing Acerola inevitably contribute directly to the Godot project
The shareholders demand you start taking more pictures
Godot is also intentionally made for making tooling. There are several features that were added almost exclusively for making tools, like multi window support. Also, the interface side of the engine is made in the engine
then they made milti window games like windowkill lol
Yup. There are quite a few tools made with Godot too
@@zeta3341 yea like pixelorama, or material maker, or rpg in a box
The Godot Engine editor being a Godot Engine game itself is the best example
so you can make modding tools in godot? like imagine a custom VMF loader (so you can use Godot Editor for making Source maps, just can't compile them i suppose)
I love godot but as an active user I feel like the biggest thing holding the engine back is shaders. Maybe your involvement can somehow lead to them improving the rendering pipeline?
Also the C# support is terrible to say the least
@@BarcelonaMove In what way exactly? Documentation wise? I haven't had much of an issue there at the very least by extrapolating the gdscript property and method names and just attempting to apply that in C# code standards. And debugging is pretty viable as well. Just curious what support issues you've had.
@@BarcelonaMove And don't even get me started on the VR Support for Standalone Devices, i would love to leave Unity behind, but i think it will take many more years until that is a feasible option for professional production...
@@BarcelonaMoveeverybody says this, but I've had no problems so far with c#
@@DonC876I haven't tested on standalone VR devices yet, but Godot seems to have no issues with my sort of scuffed Quest 3 on Linux setup.
Moving to an open source engine for your projects is really cool because not only is it free but you're free to do whatever you want with it. Both kinds of free
gratis AND libre; a fine combination.
Cool
a standalone "shader playground" sounds really cool, can't wait to see what you're cooking up next year!
probably baking
As a 1/250000 stake holder of Acerola shares, I want my share to be used to keep one two hundred and fifty thousand's of Acerola brain to constantly think of how he is doing a good job. Keep it up !
If that is not feasible, use my share to think of a subway surfers adhd sludge cat just like in your ads. Just keep the cat in your brain at 1/250000 power all the time.
2nd that
> the year is 2026
> Acerola is now God-Emperor of the Godot shader pipeline
> Unity is bankrupt
> Unreal is barely scraping by on Fortnite money
> they simply cannot compete
If unreal fails it will be due to the declining quality of AAA games, which are too expensive and so they rely on premade assets and code too much to reduce costs. Combine that with poor storytelling due to the game length limitations and you end up with just repetitive multiplayer games.
> Half-Life 3 releases along with the Source 2 SDK
@@jesusmora9379 Because of the bad rep, people who make good games will avoid Unreal.
From there, UE will start declining in usage.
What did you smoke??
@@ferdinandkasangati5089 and where can i get some
Another internet person I need to add to my list of cool Godot people
We gotta love new people joining the Godot Community :D
I wrote a native godot extension in Rust that allowed me to render directly to a render texture within godot with a graphics pipeline I wrote in rust.
It worked surprisingly well. I thought it was cool and served a very niche use case I had at work, but did not really see a wider use case until watching this video.
The rust backend I used was wgpu, which meant I could write all my pipelines in native rust and use godot as the presentation layer. I imagine there might be some overlap with what you're trying to achieve here. Happy to share code if you read this and think you might find something like this interesting.
Nice, that’s smart.
I really like the rapid development speed for gameplay with GDScript but being able to use an extension for an alternative renderer or any high performance / stable part of the code in a proper language like Rust would be the best of both worlds. I never had a Godot project mature enough that I needed native code yet and I found the iteration speed with Swift in Godot to be lacking for stuff like gameplay programming. But for more stable modules or a new renderer, that’s such a cool way to make Godot even better.
that is so sick dude
I'd personally love to check that out, if only because I've been following Rust's development in the GUI/game space a bit, and this sounds neat. Would this happen to be on Github or something? (But don't feel like you should publish it for my sake, though.)
Bro what's wrong with you? Don't ask if someone's interested, just drop your repo bro
@w花b That's not very nice
"Why I'm Moving To Hazel In 2026" this time next year 😉
so true
2026 is the year of the hazel game engine!1!11
Agree!
The shareholders express confidence in the management's decision to move to Godot
its super cool hearing these news! godot feels like exciting new ground, and im happy to see more people trying it out (and adopting it). congrats on this year's achievements!
oh boy! now i can pretend im being productive by watching your videos in the same game engine as you!
Godot is such a joy to use. Once you get your bearings it doesn't take a tutorial to make anything new, unlike most other engines (in my experience).
I found scenes confusing before i watched tutorials, but i was coming from game maker
Damn I hope Godot adds an easier way to add compositor effects... working with the vertex and fragment shaders with the built-in editor is SO simple, but going that extra step further really makes it complex.. But I guess that also makes it fun.
I believe they will eventually, it's just such a new feature its basically still in testing phase.
@@GoblinArmyInYourWalls Yeah, this is discussed a lot in the shader meetings, there are plans to improve it and reduce the boilerplate a lot and such but it's a step by step process. User feedback is now important to start taking into account too so hold onto your hats peps!
Ever since I found out about the new compositor API for godot I've been excited to keep sinking my teeth deeper into them. The real pain I had attempting to use them so far has been attempting to understand the vulkan component of setting the pipelines up.
I'm incredibly hopeful that referencing your implementations for the vulkan api calls will shed light on a lot of the mystery and confusion I've had so far.
probably where I'll start too
Seeing this channel pop from 20k subs so fast has been a treat, congrats!
Super duper omega cool, Acerola
Happy to hear that you are moving to Godot, I'm sure your contributions to the community will be invaluable
Thanks!
Glad to hear you're enjoying compositor effects, looking forward to seeing what you create with them :)
Thanks for the continued Godot XR support, really means a lot.
That's huge! I was kind of bummed last time I tried to put my hands into rendering stuff in Godot, but now I'll be able to go back into Vulkan madness to do what I want! Also, the Godot reshade project is really cool!
Thank you for the great attribution to the Godot Learning-scape, I'm just getting into it and starting my own game as a solo dev, I hope I can learn even a fraction of what you spoke of and have it stick 🙏
4:28 is when you get to see the cat
welcome to Godot!
I'm beyond excited to have you working with the compositor API!! I've wanted to play with it myself, but I'm still a beginner to graphics APIs, so this new tool of yours will be amazingly helpful for the growth of the engine I think! cant wait for the super cool stuff in 2025 :D
6:22 Omg, I love Freya Holmér so much, probably my favourite creator now, so cool to know that Acerola watched her content too!
;-;;;
omg i wanted to use your effects on my photography as soon as I saw them, this would be soooo cool :D especially the pixel sorter
This is the best news I've heard about 2025 so far. I've been using Godot for my own projects, and starting my journey into shaders with this engine has undoubtedly been a challenge.
So pumped to see you moving over to Godot! I have implemented a couple of your shaders in Godot, and really enjoy working in it. Looking forward to the new year!
In the spirit of the annual shareholder meeting: I've been watching your videos since the Kuwahara filter, and I think it's crazy how consistently high-quality your stuff is. To me, you are a top-tier youtube person, up there with Technology Connections and 3Blue1Brown. Instant watch, no alt-tab. I have learned a lot from your videos - thank you.
Technology Connections represent
Wooo it's always good to see more documentation for FOSS. I'm looking forward to future videos!
as someone who's been building a game in godot and dipping their toes into graphics programming, this is very exciting news!
This is a late christmas gift. You have no idea how excited I am for this. I've been trying to translate your shader work into godot for some time, but I just lack the skill to do so.
Unity community losing Acerola is equivalent to jjk sorcerers using Gojo
maybe its the Geto situation though? :x
@@ererbe who is Geto in this situation though? Sebastian League?
Unity forums losing Bgolus would be worse.
Bruh engines don't actually matter what matters is game dev
@@tnt3t it matters when one is a big deal open source project, and the other has actively tried to screw over its users for money for like the past decade or so lol
it was cool meeting you at Siggraph man, props for trying to improve godot!
Another day, another W for the Godot community :)
Awesome. I would be happy to see devlogs of your progress re-implementing all those shaders, but I don't know what portion of your audience would want to see that.
After recently moving to Godot from Unity myself, I'm very happy with the choice. There's the obvious learning curve of a new tool but working on projects consistently helps mitigate that. Looking forward to seeing how your projects turn out in the future Ace!
Godot was what got me into programming at 29 years old. That also made me watch your videos because i got really into graphics. Happy to have you in the community.
The project looks amazing ! hype to see all the next video about it ;) !
Hello. I have been watching your videos for a while now and I wanted to leave some encouraging comments. Because the work you do is great. And because I already suspect there will be some weirdos in the comments pushing their culture war on you. I generally don't comment unless I feel like I have anything significant to add, and I have very limited experience with shaders so I rarely have anything to add to your videos. But I just want to say this time that I have always appreciated the sheer inspiration your videos give me. Please don't stop doing what you do.
acerola focusing on godot is the best news I've heard this month, so happy to hear your plans for this tool!
I hope one day we can get an Open Source game engine as amazing as Blender is for 3D modeling. Hopefully with talented people like you in the community, Godot can continue trying to work its way towards that goal.
Happy New Year Acerola!
Very happy to see you moving to Godot!
Looks like it was a great year, and 2025 looking to be better! I wish you good luck with your project and learning process!
Cool! can't wait to see what more you will make in Godot!
Welcome to Godot bro, I look forward to learning a ton from you!
Nice new year gift, thank you Acerola
I wonder, did "acerola" come from the fruits name? Acerola Is very popular fruit here in Brazil 🇧🇷. In every video and every time you say it I think about the tiny red fruit. Is it strange?
Nah it's a reference to a vampire character named "Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade" (also known as Shinobu) from the Monogatari series, which is a light novel series that has an anime adaptation. Title screens like 0:20 are recreations of the ones seen in the anime.
@VeilStar that's also cute
Awesome sauce - stumbled upon your channel yesterday afternoon and binged some of your videos since then. They've kindled an interest in graphics programming for me.
Hope your new year will be full of exciting projects and developments!
2025 is finally the year of the Godot desktop! wait what
Your channel has been such an awesome find for me this last year. I appreciate that you don't shy away from the math. Way to go with all you've accomplished!
thank you, godots shader library is a desert
Excited to see more of your stuff in the new year! Thanks for a year of great videos!
You're so inspiring. I'm happy to hear you'll be joining us on the Godot frontier
also I'm a lighting freak with a weak grasp of the technical side of engines so... I'll be looking forward to seeing what emerges
Hopefully Godot will become more powerful while staying free.
this might not be that related to the topic at hand, but your shader project has reminded me of a game i played a while ago called "Carceri". It's a pretty basic 3D colectathon game, but it's main appeal comes in the form of an in-game camera that has a BUNCH of different shader settings that can be applied together for different effects. I'm really not that knowledgable about shader magic myself, but if you'd take a look at it and decide if it'd make for an interesting video I'd love it if you'd explain how each of the shaders the game can use and combine works, especially the more complex ones.
Wah ! Waiting your CRT shaders, it will be awesome !
Lets go yet another banger aceroller video
i cannot express enough how the little wave you do in the beginning of your videos has etched itself into my brain
Welcome to the Godot club!
ONE OF US; ONE OF US
@@KKJKJH is that a simpson reference?
I knew you got a lot entries for the jam, I didn't realize it was nearly 10x! WOW. Wasn't joking when I said you're a absolute boon to the community-- you PROVED it.
Happy New Year, Mr. 'Rola!
That was quite a 2024. Kudos! Keep doing what you do. You're an inspiration to many.
It's also great to hear about your health journey from time to time. You're taking weight training seriously already. And, based on that one thumbnail you used, I hope that you are also taking whole plant foods, across all its food groups, seriously as well.
Your shift towards Godot is an interesting development too. That's going to be a big shot in the arm for its more open-source-minded community. Better tech and games, in the long-run. Woot!
Be well, and Godspeed, good Sir! 🫡✌️🖖
Honest question, why can't all of this be done with it unity custom render pipeline? And didn't unity announced that they plan on unifying urp and hdrp?
it can be done with unity, i am just not doing it with unity
I look like forward to your Godot Wizardry!
I don't know who you are, but we welcome you in Foss and Godot
The dream for me would be this image editor idea, but instead of images let me load a model or better yet any node into the application , select it's textures and apply shaders directly to the textures with a live view of the model. Wrap it up as an addon so I can just select an asset (image or model) run it through the addon and have customized shader effects on the texture. Similar functionality would be amazing for screen space effects and loading a full scene.
Of course the image editor is step one and a ton of work already. But I can dream! Super looking forward to what you come with, and can't wait to learn more from you.
The thrid eye widens.
For Christmas this year I got myself a copy of Real-Time Rendering. Perhaps I’ll make the switch over to Godot to follow along here. Thank you for being an inspiration!
I have literally been waiting for this for months now. I hope you revise some stuff you already went through and how to do them in Godot, because it's so much different than Unity.
excellent meeting, continue on crushing it
I'm curious as to why writing shaders for URP is so much more unpleasant for you than SRP.
built in is not srp
I believe @theftking here is referring to SRP as Standard-Render-Pipeline = Built-In-Render-Pipeline, not as in Scriptable-Render-Pipeline. I’m also curious about this.
@@Acerola_t yeah I meant "standard render pipeline". In hindsight, it's not a very good acronym for built-in.
Happy New Year, Acerola!
1:16 PEAK MENTIONED
The tool you're working on sounds fantastically useful! Looking forward to it!
Godot on the surface is great, but as soon as you try and make any kind of remotely serious project, its limitations and general shortcomings hit you like a truck. I really wouldn't advise switching to it, especially as a graphics programmer
Godot just isn't mature enough to swap to for the vast majority of people. There was an initial "GODOT HYPE!" period, but otherwise the engine simply isn't mature enough. It also has been in development for quite a while for it to be in the state that it is in.
same with unreal engine tbh
@@lifeartstudios Im sure its true with any engine to some extent. But godot is particularly bad even with simple things like bringing in assets or working with the editor. Ive had so many instances of features flat out not working, performance sucking for no reason, editor crashes, instances of asset corruption, instances where its just impossible to do what I want (especially from a rendering standpoint)
If I had to put it into words, Id say the ratio between its good and bad parts is worse off than any other engines Ive seen. It doesnt offer nearly enough to make its problems justifiable or usable, even for an open source project. Its a relatively basic engine all things considered, theres no excuse. Youd save quite a bit of time in the long run just by making your own engine, even for 3D
This is so goddam cool, thank you for supporting the Godot ecosystem and making such a cool tool! Happy 2025!
Ok so after watching the video fully, this is actually really fucking cool, especially the export of shaders.
Since it will eventually be Open Source, have you considered trying to get it committed to the official release of Godot?
Godot has a policy of not including too specific things in it, like the Terrain3D addon, it's not applicable to everyone, might not receive long term support, and actually makes developing it harder compared to an addon.
GDExtension w/ C++ is always an option as well... but I wonder how much integration beyond the Compositor he would actually benefit from. Sounds like the Compositor might meet all of his needs out of the box, though more approachable access to GLSL support might be helpful for some of us, it might not be for Acerola.
I'm looking forward to his impressions as he shares them throughout the upcoming year!
In the meantime, I'll be hoping for support for sharing buffers between Compute and Fragment shaders :3
A nice feature for this would be to have the image picker for the scene support gifs and video files, so you could see the effects animated. Can’t wait to see the finished product!
That sounds like a 3D image. And it does support it in the form of sampler3D.
It just can't convert gifs and videos directly to the format (i think)
4:08 gotta try that with bro 😊
@Acerola, your post-processing tool is impressive. Adapting it for Gadot development on Meta Quest 3 and other upcoming standalone VR headsets like Vive Focus, Samsung's Android XR device, Sony's new HMD, and Lynx R1 would be fantastic. These Qualcomm-based VR headsets utilize Vulkan and have ***STRICT*** graphics performance requirements. From my experience porting a DirectX SteamVR game to Quest, I understand the challenges in VR optimization and shader development, and I know you enjoy optimizing against limits so I encourage you to consider, would be happy to help in any way possible.
Never in my life have I clicked so fast on a UA-cam thumbnail.
Now that I'm finally commenting, I'd like to thank you for you amazing work, and I hope you'll be able to continue along that path as long as you want. I can't wait to see what wonders you'll come up with in Godot. Have a nice day!
That's an insanely productive year, you're killing it my man.
But Acerola, why do you hate URP?
I love your dry humor. Never change.
You killed it in 2024, and looking forward to your future videos!
I also moved from Unity after decade+ work exp, for personal projects. But instead Godot I decided to go with own C/C++ engine.
Tried "let's make an editor" path about a year ago, went decently well, but not much was done in terms of graphics, and I returned to Unity for some time.
About a month ago decided to start again, now with multi graphics API in mind, and beginning with DX11 instead OpenGL. I come up with cool idea - export Unity scene to my engine, and make it work. This way I could see what I'm missing, and I can directly compare performance. Now I'm more or less done with graphics core.
- More or less all abstraction are done(Textures, Color Buffers, Shaders, Vertex/Index/Constant buffers, etc)
- Own math library (vector2-4, matrix3-4, plane, quaternion, .. mostly taken from my first attempt)
- Shader passes and material system + PBR Shading
- Optimized draw queue (less shader/material rebind), sorting
- Flexible Frustum Culling
- Cubemap generation + PBR Convolution generation on GPU
- Text rendering system + dev console
- Shadow via Shadow Map
I'd say "first 90%" of graphics features I need ready, and now I can refactor and start working on physics and scene.
Funny enough I already have better visuals and about 5-10x faster runtime. Even without SIMD and cache locality optimizations, so I'm good for now :)
P.S. My C++ skill is mid at best. 1st attempt was literally my first experience with C/C++ after C#. Now I'm writing something like "C with classes", since I don't like modern C++ style
5-10x faster runtime? That is huge, i am assuming we are talking about graphical performance? Can you make a comparison of the scene in unity and your own engine?
@ yeah. It’s hard to compare 1 to 1, because of little differences, but whole picture is visible anyway. Unity version uses Built-in Render, most materials with Standard shader, 4 shadow cascade, 1 direct light source, 1 reflection probe, no baked GI, no Batching, linear color space, forward render. In this scenario Render thread is about 2ms. In my engine shaders are different (more similar to UE), obviously different culling and sorting algorithms, plus ACES tonemapping in final blit. My render loop is about 0.2-0.4ms, and can be easily improved further.
This difference comes from many factors. Unity is far more flexible, and have more features (they not used in test scene, but support cost something as well), some things are strange, and not very optimized, like screen space shadow cascade blending, instead of blending in forward shaders, excessive intermediate RT and multiple blits ( support for stuff like OnImageRender I believe)
Surely custom SRP will have more similar performance, with main difference in Culling
I'm super happy to see more and more nice people moving to Godot! :D Looking forward to try your shader tool! :D
You should also make the tool be able to export the shader arrangement so that:
1. People could share/exchange them
2. A plugin could be made that applies them as a postprocessing filter in games made in Godot
I'm so hyped!! I was just about to get started working in Godot, and this is really inspiring. I've been watching your graphics programming videos for years now, and they were always really interesting. I felt a little left out, because of the Unity fiasco, i didn't want to use Unity. But learning a new game engine on top of shader code with nearly no prior experience in either, and few available resources was really intimidating. Can't wait to see whats coming up next, and I hope i can look back on this comment in the future with a successful shader!
best christmas gift, me and many are lucky to see you switching to godot!
beyond anything it's really great to know you've been focusing on your health a bit!!!
1:56 andy math reference
As a Godot user whos been struggling to learn shaders, i am so hype. Been following you since your first FFXIV shaders (at least the first ones i saw) and i look forward to seeing how you take Godot to the next level!
But Acerola... Godot doesn't have AsyncGPUReadback!
it was merged for 4.4 three weeks ago haha
Thats some banger news to start 2025! as a huge godot fan and conniseur of every single one of your videos Im hyped!
I unironically started looking into shaders because of you wave videos and started to learn math concepts I was too lazy for in school (I always hated math but turns out its quite useful). Looking forward to your program
I'm a game art student with experience in Unity, Unreal, and Godot, and I have to say that Godot unfortunately has some pretty big UI design flaws that make it difficult to use. When it comes to selecting objects, and multi-selecting especially, it is really unintuitive and at times borderline unusable. There have been a number of times where I had to resort to manually selecting in the hierarchy because selecting through the viewport didn't work.
The shader editor, while being good enough at a basic level, is missing some very useful functionality that's practically standard and used all the time in Unity and Unreal. Things like transforming the UVs or configuring backface culling do not have properly implemented functionality.
Being unable to customize the UI windows to your preference is also a huge drawback for me. While it is customizable, it's still limited to a number of preset configurations, which means I can't just drag and drop windows to make them the way I want them to be.
And as a last point, Godot simply does not work with my laptop's processor. When I run a scene, a lot of the time it does not start, and the only viable solution is to get new hardware.
While Godot surely has come a long way, it still has a bit to go before it becomes a viable alternative to me
Have you written a report about your crashes? I'm sure they want to target as much hardware as possible
your feedback is great but don't worry, the next flight to a convention will surely fix those problems!
"Things like transforming the UVs or configuring backface culling do not have properly implemented functionality." what are you talking about? you can literally just do these things
@@wareyathe only thing I can think of is if it's a visual shader (as in the shadergraph alternative) thing? I don't use those so I don't know but yeah they are very much possible in text shaders lol
@@plusonerabbit visual shaders have backface culling as a mode selection in the resource property editor, and UV transforms are done in visual shaders with normal vector math nodes