this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
81 points (97.6% liked)
Godot
5903 readers
4 users here now
Welcome to the programming.dev Godot community!
This is a place where you can discuss about anything relating to the Godot game engine. Feel free to ask questions, post tutorials, show off your godot game, etc.
Make sure to follow the Godot CoC while chatting
We have a matrix room that can be used for chatting with other members of the community here
Links
Other Communities
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Rules
- Posts need to be in english
- Posts with explicit content must be tagged with nsfw
- We do not condone harassment inside the community as well as trolling or equivalent behaviour
- Do not post illegal materials or post things encouraging actions such as pirating games
We have a four strike system in this community where you get warned the first time you break a rule, then given a week ban, then given a year ban, then a permanent ban. Certain actions may bypass this and go straight to permanent ban if severe enough and done with malicious intent
Wormhole
Credits
- The icon is a modified version of the official godot engine logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)
- The banner is from Godot Design
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's tends to be one major difference between games and non-game applications, so toolkits designed for one are often quite unsuitable for the other.
A game generally performs logic to paint the whole window, every frame, with at most some framerate-limiting in "paused" states. This burns power but is steady and often tries hard to reduce latency.
An application generally tries to paint as little of the window as possible, as rarely as possible. Reducing video bandwidth means using a lot less power, but can involve variable loads so sometimes latency gets pushed down to "it would be nice".
Notably, the implications of the 4-way choice between {tearing, vsync, double-buffer, triple-buffer} looks very different between those two - and so does the question of "how do we use the GPU"?
Does this mean you're against using Godot for apps?
Personally, I feel like the extra load to reduce latency is worth it, but I honestly don't know how different the load is or how much it could be optimized. But really snappy reactive software, even when long-running processes are going, feel much better to use. I'm getting tired of using web apps for everything.
As far as what does the GPU do, right now if we're talking like b2b stuff you could do a lot more local number crunching or do really rich graphs with compute shaders etc. In the future, maybe the CPU handles most of the app and the GPU handles an AI workload in the background?
I guess I forgot to mention the other implicit difference in concerns:
When you are a game, you can reasonably assume: I have the user's full focus and can take all the computing resources of their device, barring a few background apps.
When you are an application, the user will almost always have several other applications running to a meaningful degree, and those eat into available resources (often in a difficult-to-measure way). Unfortunately this rarely gets tested.
I'm not saying you can't write an app using a game toolkit or vice versa, but you have to be aware of the differences and figure out how to configure it correctly for your use case.
(though actually - some purely-turn-based games that do nothing until user enters input do just fine on app toolkits. But the existence of such games means that game toolkits almost always support some way of supporting the app paradigm. By contrast, app toolkits often lack ready support for continuous game paradigms ... unless you use APIs designed for video playback, often involving creating a separate child "window". Actual video playback is really hard; even the makers of dedicated video-playing programs mess it up.)