Some Godot 4 preliminary work

[Meptl]

I was curious how difficult it would be to migrate the code to work with Godot 4, so I worked on it for a few days and am not finding it entirely trivial so I'm not going to continue working on it. I pushed my work to the gd4-dev branch of my fork, I've added relevant upstream godot commit hashes in my commit messages. Further progress would be to continue compiling and seeing what errors come up and fixing them. Admittedly there's likely something I'm doing wrong because some issues I'm running into are from commits that are 2 years old; I probably flipped some incorrect flags when fixing up the build scripts.

Here is the full list of commits/PRs I found relevant while working which I've also linked them in my commit messages:

Remove compat layer for py2 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/commit/3d2dd79ecd2c8456ba9401f6b12333d01f61e13e
Change in build script tools arg https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/3371
register -> initialize https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/60723
method_bind_ext.gen.inc https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/42826
HashMap/OrderedHashMap https://github.com/godotengine/godot/commit/8b7c7f5a753b43cec10f72b274bb1d70c253652b
Map removal https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/60999
PoolVector https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/36311 3205a92ad872f918c8322cdcd1434c231a1fd251
RES -> Ref<> https://github.com/godotengine/godot/commit/180e5d30286279c979507a571bf6d336aa49da9d
get_len -> get_length() https://github.com/godotengine/godot/commit/f164c00a94793234879dc1824bd657db6df939ec
VARIANT_ARG* https://github.com/godotengine/godot/commit/21637dfc2535a00f531b8b664c1e66ba34d11eb0
MethodBind -> variadic templates ee06a70ea6ac51aa451d55c92b807346458822d7
has_no_area -> has_area 995b9f94e8378b3e1dd81068925e9d34c68445c6
Rect2i.clip 2df9a8ccad
Variant::REAL->FLOAT PackedIntArray 33b5c57199
Image::create -> Image::initialize_data 072f6feabac
PROPERTY_USAGE_NOEDITOR -> PROPERTY_USAGE_NO_EDITOR c012fbc8b2
Variant::interpolate -> Animation::interpolate_variant 9d47e079b7
Rename `CanvasItem.update()` to `queue_redraw() e31bb5ffeb
set_custom_property_info change 7c6b659bd799080ca3a84110b112313a8cd12b1f
Removed _change_notify  1aa2823fa3
rad2deg 59e11934d8
Vector::invert -> Vector::reverse 755c70b871
Texture::get_data -> Texture::get_image fd30c36985
FileAccess::open returns Ref<FileAccess> 9381acb6a42
Rename instance() -> instantiate() e28fd07b2b
VS renamed to RS a6f3bc7c69
Forward declare MenuButton ba9e619b51b

I removed locks on image_indexed because I don't know anything

If a header file was missing, I checked if another of the same name exists in godot and simply updated the path if so.

[Xrayez]

Yeah, indeed, it's a lot of work. If Goost doesn't get enough contributors to do this, then something tells me that the project may be broken down into GDExtensions... See #135. It is still a lot of work though, but with extensions, there's a possibility that some features may be implemented individually without having to update the entire Goost. At the same time, if you look at the first commit of this repository, I wanted to consolidate the work to act as a natural extension for Godot, since most features that you see here were rejected by Godot leadership, but needed by community.

As for myself, as I said, I don't use Godot anymore, but the work is not wasted. In either case, Goost is a decent source of features to build upon, in whatever shape or form (not necessarily for Godot). A lot of features that you see in Goost were done to:

• Add essential/convenience functionality.
• Remove the chore.
• Add visual debugging capabilities.
• Access core data structures without having to reinvent them.

Due to above, I'm currently using LÖVE with its LuaJIT which allows to use C data structures directly and use external C libraries without even having to recompile anything, something which is not possible with Godot. The API is more intricate, but its proportionate to a variety of possibilities. Note that I don't use LÖVE for production though, only for visualization/experimentation/prototyping. I also tried Beef, it became more mature over the years.

As Godot is planning to remove extra modules and even core functionality to GDExtensions (you can already see signs of this, such as removed InterpolatedCamera and VisualScript modules in Godot), I suppose that Godot will eventually become quite barebones. However, that's exactly what describes Defold. 😛

Godot will likely remove features for similar reasons that they allegedly cannot "maintain" them, despite having "thousands of contributors". Perhaps you can extrapolate where this is going: the "new" Unity, but not quite. 😉

Update: Eventually, I switched to Unity. Objectively, the API of Unity is way more complete than Godot's one. I still occasionally use other game engines and frameworks for prototyping purposes.

[m21-cerutti]

Is there some roadmap or plan for Godot4 or is that currently paused/abandonned dur to GDExtensions ?

[Meptl]

There is not a plan for Godot 4. This repo is unmaintained after the main developer could no longer work on Godot.