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Godot drives me insane.

I can see that it has all the capabilities to achieve amazing things.
The issue is... No one has the knowledge.


Allow me to rephrase that : There are a TON of people who have Godot knowledge. The issue is... Unless you know someone who's willing to be fully involved in your project then it seems impossible to receive consistent and proper help with Godot.

There used to be some sort of Godot forum, similar to the AGS one, which has now shut down (every time you click on a google result you get a 404). Not a good move, I would say!

Then there's Discord. Have you ever visited the Godot Discord? Let me tell you, it's nothing like AGS. There's a gazillion posts per minute. And since it's a continuous flow of chat messages, there's zero consistency. Messages about several topics are mixed together, and you never know what will be the quality of answers. It's like a Russian roulette. The people helping have either no time to try to understand what you're doing, or give crude answers without explaining why the solution is the solution. When the answer is not plain wrong!

I remembered fondly my early days in the AGS forums, when there were people like Ashen, monkey0506, Khris etc. who knew what the hell they were talking about. The information was clear, correct, and there was room for follow-up questions.

Yesterday I tried asking ChatGPT about Godot. The quality of the answer was amazing.... I had a brief moment of euphoria, thinking I had finally found my solution... Until I realized it was ChatGPT3 and its knowledge stops in 2021. It was giving answers incompatible with Godot 4.1.1 (deprecated classes)! And of course, the Godot help page doesn't clearly state that the lass is deprecated (well, it does, but... at the end of the page!)

I'm literally banging my head against the walls. AGS is awesome. Godot is even more awesome (because it's a heavyweight) but all that awesomeness goes to shit instantly, every time.


I was tempted by an upgrade from AGS to Godot. But now I'm seriously considering reverting my experimentations and throwing away those last 2 years of experiments with Godot.

[Context:]

Context:
AGS has no problem working with high-resolution games : With hardware acceleration it can display lots of sprites and tint them, etc. The engine is also performant enough for scripting effects when you stick to built-in operations (native sprite scaling, native transparency, etc.).

But AGS becomes slower when you want to make the AGS script handle more intensive algorithms, such as iterating on large arrays of hundreds of thousands of items, or trying to perform per-pixel operations on larger sprites, or when your function calls stack exceeds a certain depth.

This is why when it comes to scripting, especially special effects, AGS is better suited for low-resolution games : 320x200 or 640x480. And that's also why advanced shaders written with the AGS scripting language are out of the question.


I sometimes ask myself why that is. What are the reasons why the AGS scripting language is not lightning fast?

Having very little knowledge of the engine's code, I can't seem to come up with a reason :
- It uses SDL, which is very close to the hardware. If not the fastest possible option, it's pretty close.
- It's written in C/C++
- The virtual machine is running pre-compiled code, literally just byte code.

So, what is slow in all this? Is it that the VM's instructions are not mapped directly to the underlying CPU instructions? Is it that the engine uses simple data structures with a lot of overhead and lookups? Etc.

[The guys behind Escoria made it (mostly) work with Godot 3.0. There's a branch for that in their github, conveniently named "Escoria 3.0". It's good enough for any adventure game, really.]

Here is some non-trivial information about this attempt:
- Godot recently got a big boost (both in features and popularity and visibility) which made it move from "promising" to "the main 100% free rival to Unity".
- Escoria is a library/framework written in Godot script that implements in Godot all the tedious things expected in an adventure game (save/restore games + actions verbs + high level scripting language ("Esc" language) to script dialogs and custscenes).

The mild weakness of this is that Escoria had a flamboyant start but then became immediately obsolete when Godot moved up to Godot 3.0 and then 3.1. It broke some things.
The guys behind Escoria made it (mostly) work with Godot 3.0. There's a branch for that in their github, conveniently named "Escoria 3.0". It's good enough for any adventure game, really. Escoria also has a branch for Godot 3.1 and 3.1.1. But they're not actively developing those ones.

I've been trying to run the demo game of Escoria 3.0 in Godot 3.0.x (3.0.6) and I got a crash after a few clicks  But maybe it's just me who doesn't know enough yet. I'll keep you updated on that.

If anyone has a suggestion for another set of tools to develop a point n click game in Godot, then they're welcome to reply here.