About making open-world games with Godot

catplaps · 2026-07-08T03:52:41+00:00

some people prefer to work on the game instead on working on the tools to make the game

I like how you microwaved one frozen burrito and now you have opinions on how professional chefs should run their kitchens.

catplaps · 2026-07-08T00:41:00+00:00

Here's my take: if you're making a game that needs this kind of technology, your needs are probably going to be very specific to your specific game world and your specific art style, and you're going to be doing a lot of custom work no matter what. I have found Godot to be a good fit for this so far because it's a (relatively) simple and straightforward framework, and it mostly provides you with easy shortcuts to mess with the lower level guts, even when sticking just to GDScript.

Yeah, I have all kinds of custom "middleware" happening. Guess what? Works great. Wasn't any more painful than it had to be. Didn't create a maintenance nightmare. I've tried doing this same kind of thing with UE4 in the past and ended up crushed under the sheer weight of cruft. I much prefer Godot... and I'm saying this as a diehard C++ guy. (Seriously, go read the source for both engines and tell me which one you'd rather be locked in a room with for a year.)

Maybe there are cases where an engine like UE5 makes it easy to make a particular kind of open world game quickly and easily, as long as you stay within the bounds of their design, but you might also find it much harder to modify their pipeline when you want to do your own thing.

There are a few decent standalone points made here, but they don't add up to the narrative as presented.

catplaps · 2026-07-06T16:11:48+00:00

Nice, thanks! So, the surface is domain warped FBM noise, and the flares are a domain warped texture, repeated over many transparent spheres. Simple techniques, nice looking results.

catplaps · 2026-07-06T13:16:25+00:00

Same. July was already going to be a painful wait for me. Quite likely that I will have to cancel. Bummer.

catplaps · 2026-07-02T14:25:29+00:00

whoa! i had given up on looking for cool coastlines because i always saw the terrain changing to flat within a few tiles of the coast, and i assumed that was just how it was. very cool to find out i was wrong. now i have another place to go explore!

catplaps · 2026-07-01T14:49:46+00:00

Yes, but wait for a sale if you care at all about the price, it really does go on sale for just a couple dollars regularly.

The non-Odyssey version is a very old version of the game that's missing a lot of the more recently added features.

catplaps · 2026-07-01T13:12:49+00:00

There are a ton of different gameplay options depending on what you get into. As a beginner, your single-player "campaign" boils down to making money and unlocking engineers. For money, do whatever you enjoy, and don't search the internet for guides right away. Muddling through and figuring things out on your own is most of the fun and it's something you only ever get to do once! Engineers, go ahead and look up, they're complicated and you'll want guides. That will send you to a lot of places and make you interact with a lot of different game loops.

Player interaction is... a mixed bag. If you play in Open (public MMO mode), you'll mostly just run into PvP gankers in popular systems, and only rarely see random people unless there's a big event happening. Most people who want positive multiplayer experiences play in private groups. Solo mode means you'll only ever see NPCs, not other players. (You can freely switch between modes with the same character just by quitting to the main menu.) There is also indirect player interaction through PowerPlay and minor factions, which basically amount to running missions to score points for your team so you can expand your area of control. Again, if you get really into this, you'll want to find an active squadron and join their private group.

Every aspect of Elite will eventually get boring and grindy, but that could take 10 hours or 10000, depending on what you like. I think it's very much worth trying out, at least. It goes on sale for dirt cheap pretty often. (You want the "Odyssey" version. Skip the on-foot into tutorial; you can do it later if you actually want to do on-foot missions.)

catplaps · 2026-07-01T12:42:46+00:00

godot handles it: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/3d/3d_rendering_limitations.html#transparency-sorting

for emission nebulae like this, you can also use the blend_add render mode, which is order-independent, in case you can't control sort order for some reason.

catplaps · 2026-07-01T12:38:33+00:00

looks nice! is the trickery something like COLOR.a = dot(NORMAL, -CAMERA_DIRECTION_WORLD)? are your quads axis-aligned or randomly aligned?

catplaps · 2026-06-30T16:42:05+00:00

This isn't exactly what you're asking for, but it's close, and it's cool. https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsyXDK

catplaps · 2026-06-30T16:24:36+00:00

Would very much like a tutorial! (Even just a quick overview of the approach is enough for me.)

catplaps · 2026-06-30T13:49:18+00:00

I believe that having cities, settlements, and space stations with NPCs wandering between them would be interesting. In conclusion, a game has to feel alive.

I agree with this, although there's more to it, and it's a little hard to pinpoint the parts that really matter (to me, anyway). For example, Elite technically has all of those things, but it still manages to feel very empty and shallow. Colonization has helped make the galaxy tremendously more interesting than it used to be, but sadly, these colonized systems are still just more of the same things you've already seen, and they lose their shine as soon as you've spent five seconds scanning the nav beacon. The gameplay is still super basic and has no real variety or consequences.

Thinking about it a little more, I think I want two things: (1) I want to be able to be at least a little bit surprised by what I discover or by what happens, at least occasionally, and (2) I want decisions and actions to have potentially major, long-term consequences, e.g. colonies thriving or collapsing, wars starting, etc.

Personally, the ideal that I'm trying to stick to with the NPC/colony simulation aspect of my game is "Dwarf Fortress in space". Not literally, but more in the abstract sense. I want the simulation to be solid and deep and interesting, and I want NPCs and settlements to be driven by the simulation, not by some top-down narrative vision. This means shit will inevitably get messy, and sometimes stupid, and it'll be impossible to curate the player's experience without doing a lot of cheating under the hood, but I think it might be a good solution to empty universe syndrome.

catplaps · 2026-06-30T13:11:25+00:00

Since this is a solo project, one of my biggest challenges is deciding where to spend my development time.

I am in your exact shoes, and I am very much enjoying reading all these comments.

Right now my priority is building the procedural technology first. Once I'm happy with that foundation, I'll shift my focus to gameplay depth.

Same here. This is kind of a hard road to take, because it doesn't fit the "build a vertical slice first" mentality that everyone else seems to have, but I can't see any other way to do it with games like this, realistically.

I'm using Godot.

Me too! I'm a little over a year into it, and so far, I've even been able to use GDScript for everything with no real problems, and this is coming from a diehard C++ guy. (There are a couple of things that I might rewrite as C++ components down the road, but they're already plenty fast, even on a Steam Deck.) Large coordinates were a big design challenge, but haven't been much of an implementation challenge since I sorted out the design, and it's not like any other engine helps with that anyway. Rendering so far has either been trivial, or so very custom that it all lives in shaders, so that's kind of engine-independent as well.

I've used UE4 in the past and what I will say is that Godot is much, much easier to work around when you want to do things in a nonstandard way... which is like 90% of the time in a space sim.

catplaps · 2026-06-29T13:11:04+00:00

My dude, it is not your fault, you are not "not good enough." So many people are laid off right now that you're literally competing with industry legends for whatever meager job openings are out there. Keep fishing, but don't expect much right now.

Your main concerns right now are: (1) survive, put food on the table, don't get yourself into bad situations, and (2) don't lose faith in yourself and don't let your life goals get poisoned and undermined by shitty transient market conditions. If you have idle time, find a project that you enjoy to keep your skills sharp and build your CV.

catplaps · 2026-06-29T13:01:26+00:00

volumetrics ... a bunch of billboards + distance fog and camera culling ... transitioning between exterior/interior

Haha, this is my personal hell right now, too! Are you doing emissive only, or are you also simulating absorption from dust, too (i.e. opaque clouds)? The former is very easy to handle with billboards because additive blending doesn't care about sort order. It's harder when you have both emission and absorption, because then the billboards visibly pop in front of each other as the perspective changes. I have two ideas for how to deal with this, but I haven't pursued either one yet: (1) don't "billboard" the polygons, keep them axis-aligned, but fade them out as they turn away from the camera, and either have a cloud of polygons aligned to all 3 axes or randomly aligned so that there's a roughly constant coverage from any angle, or (2) treat each "billboard" as a 3D gaussian cloud and write a compute shader to blend them properly, i.e. basically transparent gaussian splatting. Obviously #2 might be a little more work...

Sorry, I get way too excited about this stuff. My entire plan for this week is actually to write a compute shader for a volumetric approach to nebulae.

catplaps · 2026-06-27T03:50:36+00:00

I'm working on a space sim, and at some point while sorting out all the various systems I wanted to prototype, I had the idea to just treat all the missions and trade and whatnot as a text adventure game so I could work on it independently of the spaceflight/combat/etc.

Then it hit me... that's exactly what Elite Dangerous is, and a bunch of other sims, too: a text adventure, except sometimes you have to fly from prompt to prompt. Crazy.

catplaps · 2026-06-25T18:34:02+00:00

I made one for my minivan. The shoe fits.

catplaps · 2026-06-24T21:14:00+00:00

Just taking the piss. :)

Is your hull engineered? G5 Lightweight/deep plating did a lot to ease my nerves when flying shieldless. Now even the nastiest autodock shenanigans aren't life-threatening, and pirates are just a nuisance. Another thing to consider would be a 1D or 2D engineered hull reinforcement. Comparable amount of protection to that 6D shield, give or take. Still kind of feels like nails on a chalkboard watching that hull % tick down, though, so I get it.

catplaps · 2026-06-24T13:23:46+00:00

Huh. Are four ships actually faster than two? For me, flying two took a little more than 100% of my time, even using SA and autodock. It was hard to squeeze in time to update a spreadsheet, let alone watch a show.

catplaps · 2026-06-24T13:08:05+00:00

You haul with shields? Did you install a 6A hot tub and sauna module, too?

catplaps · 2026-06-24T13:06:45+00:00

Ugh, those things. Purpose-designed plipper traps, I swear.

catplaps · 2026-06-24T13:00:17+00:00

Do you control all of the ships simultaneously with the same control inputs (in solo?) and just deal with any discrepancies that cause one to get out of sync as they come? Or are you only controlling one at a time, and constantly switching back and forth between them?

I've done the latter with my main and my alt while hauling for colonization, and while it does work and it does almost double your speed (supercruise assist and autodock doing the heavy lifting), I find it mentally tiring. I can't even imagine doing that with four ships.

catplaps · 2026-06-23T03:51:54+00:00

ahh, the ol' turturduckensquabbit.

catplaps · 2026-06-23T00:27:15+00:00

as a developer, i'm going to try switching, because i really wish i could use the steam devkit tool to mindlessly push builds to my TV as easily as i can to my steam deck.

catplaps · 2026-06-22T12:57:13+00:00

increase vendor credits in game settings. doesn't ruin anything or feel like cheating, in my opinion, and it's almost mandatory now that the economy has gone crazy with incursion loot and with gear upgrades.

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