When to support C++ scripts directly

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Kissescoco

Hello everyone, friends from all over the world, I am from China, in China Godot engine in some games beginners are very popular, but in China Godot engine tutorials are very few, a few people will come out with some tutorials, I can only go through the official website materials, as well as YouTube old videos.

Because I was a student, during the study of C++, want to make a game, UE is very large, very unfriendly to novices, Unity only supports C #, So is very fond of Godot, but when I came into contact with this engine I found a problem, it is not as mature as UE/Unity (this can be understood), but I just want to know, when Godot can update the direct support C++ environment, configuration is too troublesome (personally, Very few Chinese tutorials) or who can give me a friendlier latest tutorial, very grateful!

(My English is not good, use machine translation, forgive me! Thanks for reading! )

DaveTheCoder

Kissescoco configuration [for C++] is too troublesome

I agree.

Pixophir

Kissescoco UE is very large, very unfriendly to novices

You can sing that, friend. Good thing about Epic is they fund Godot :-)

Kissescoco when Godot can update the direct support C++ environment

There is/will be a fundamental and compatibility breaking change between Godot 3 and 4 concerning integration of C++. I'm also currently waiting for the updated documentation to see how the new interface works. The "latest" branch of the documentation doesn't have a conclusive tutorial on the new interface yet (link), I hope it'll be posted shortly after feature freeze which according to rumours happens the next week from the time of writing. Main thing for me is I don't want to install things I may have problems separating later, and I don't quite understand what's actually needed, apart from headers and possibly language bindings.

If this question includes when to use C++ over GDScript, the answer is probably

when functionality is needed that the engine doesn't offer and/or
when the execution power of a lower level language comes to need and/or
just because :-)

Kissescoco

Pixophir Hopefully, it can be like Unity and UE, open Visual Studio and write scripts. :-), Thanks friend

cybereality

Godot 4.0 will make integrating C++ code and libraries easier, and without recompiling the whole engine. However, C++ is not a scripting language. It was never designed to be, and very few games (even AAA games) use C++ for scripting. C++ is mainly used for the engine code, for physics, external libraries, etc. Almost all engines use some form of scripting, because it is easier, faster, and safer to use than C++. For example, the game Mass Effect for Xbox360 was done almost entirely in Kismet (the visual scripting language that became Blueprints).

So it is probably best to give GDScript a chance and see if you can figure it out. Even assuming C++ worked, there would be almost no benefit to use it for basic scripting. C++ is still useful for performance intensive code, or integrating 3rd party libraries, but you can do that already with add-ons like GDNative. Or you can try C# if you need more power and performance.

Kissescoco

cybereality Okay, thanks, I think I'll try GDscript, and the reason I want to use C++ is to consolidate by making games during this process of learning C++, :-)

cybereality

I had the same thought at first, but GDScript is a great language (it is based on Python). I find I am super fast. Things that used to take me 8 hours in Unreal only take 2 hours in Godot. So it's much easier, less code, easier to debug, and it runs generally fast enough. Most of the time the bottleneck is on the rendering (if you are doing 3D) so it doesn't matter much if you use C++ or C# or anything else. There are some things that do still need to be C++, like if you are procedurally generating a whole world, GDScript is not that fast. But for normal stuff like player controllers, and simple AI, it is fine.

Kissescoco

cybereality Thank you for making me more aware of Godot and GDscript, GDscript is indeed like this, so in China it is niche popular, I see some open source programs are also made of GDscript, such as the pixel painting software "Pixelorama", very easy to use.