Godot Engine
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2023–2024
2:46 · 172K views · Oct 6, 2022
The Godot Engine 2022 showreel of apps and tools built with Godot, with a timestamped list of each project. It shows the engine being used well beyond games.
HN points to it as the official showcase that Godot works for non-game application development.
4 comments from Hacker News
One of the leading contenders for being a modern equivalent IMO would be the Godot game engine. The Godot editor is less than 100MB to download for many platforms--the recent Godot 4 release also supports running the editor on the web[0] and on Android. Its packaging/distribution story for GUI-based applications is easier & stronger than any other modern programming environment of which I'm aware--in a large part due to the (IMO inspired ) architecture of using per-platform pre-built application templates/shells paired with per-project "data" files that contain assets & script byte code. Godot's modularity, ease of development & distribution has led to it being adopted for non-game applications too: "Apps & Tools - 2022 Showreel" < this video > I do think the initial "complexity of the programming" for an absolute beginner is probably still at least a little bit higher than drag-and-drop GUI environments like classic VB, REALbasic, VBA or Hypercard. (Primarily from a UI/UX point of view because Godot doesn't directly have the "drag button from toolbar" workflow which I think was key in earlier systems. But it is extremely modular by way of configuration & extension--one intended use case being e.g. specialized feature-subsetted tools for artists.) In my experience it also works really well for iterative development where you can just hack around (from visual & code perspectives) to get something working & then refine it (and using Godot's "Scenes" paradigm for encapsulation). An
I agree Unreal and Unity are not appropriate but I do wonder about Godot. Its early enough where it doesn't have the strong connotations of being a game engine yet. I've seen some cool applications made in it too ( this video ). So I wonder if you could apply your energy to making it more cross platform using WASM (if that's even necessary) and extend it with your own UI language instead of rolling your own?
I'm happy to see that this usage of Godot has continued. I've been interested in using Godot for application development since I saw their official "Apps & Tools - 2022 Showreel"[1] video. The only concern I see commonly mentioned is in terms of accessibility (lack of screen reader support, etc.) - which could be a major drawback for certain types of software. [1] this video
It is a good time for send the showreel of serious apps in Godot: this video I know a free software monitoring tool made with Godot: [LINK] [LINK]