The university is planning on having all our courses back in-person in Fall, and this means that my CS315 Game Programming class will once again be able to meet in the lab. Last year, I switched from UE4 to Godot Engine in large part because of the lack of access to lab machines: every student has a personal machine that can run Godot Engine, but many cannot run UE4. This Fall, I could just go back to UE4, but I have spent a lot of time with Godot Engine, and it has some distinct advantages for teaching.
I shared with my CS490 studio, via Slack, that I was thinking about the tradeoffs between these two engines. There are students in the virtual studio who have taken CS315 in both forms: some took it in Fall 2019 with UE4, and some in Fall 2020 with Godot Engine. Additionally, several of these people have since started learning different engines, such as some students who learned UE4 in class now using Godot Engine, and some who learned Godot Engine now using Unity. One student provided an excellent overview of his experience, but sadly, no one else has engaged in my request for comments.
Last Friday was the end of the third sprint for CS490, and we all met on Zoom so that the three teams could show their increments to each other. It so happens that during the discussion, a few items came up that are salient to the issue of engine selection. One team, which is using Godot Engine, had underestimated the time it took to write an AI for some of their game characters. In another project, also using Godot Engine, a student pointed out that the original compositions seemed to blend together well when switching between them. This was a happy accident and not by the design of the music nor its playback.
I commented to the students that both of these issues are great examples of the differences between engines. I pointed them to my tutorial video about UE4 behavior trees, which provide a higher level of abstraction for writing AI compared to having to do it directly in GDScript. For the audio, I mentioned that UE4 has a very robust audio framework, again with custom authoring tools well beyond what is integrated with Godot Engine. In a follow up post on Slack, I noted to them that one can crossfade audio in Godot Engine with an animation player, and I also pointed them to a reference about UE4 Sound Cues, a contextual example of crossfading using them, an amazing presentation of the advanced audio capabilities used by sonic artists, and a useful tutorial about how to write a music stitching system.
So, if UE4 has all this cool stuff, why not just use it? As I discussed with my students during the meeting, a lot of this great engine content is beyond what a student can get to in a one-semester introduction to game programming. They would be useful things to know now, having wrapped up the third iteration of a project and having already studied the basics, but I've never seen a student in CS315 get as far as really needing advanced audio or behavior trees. For behavior trees in particular, when I have offered some A-level credit for exploring them, it's always been a bit disappointing because it's the tail wagging the dog: students make a simple behavior tree to show they can rather than use them to solve an actual problem they have.
Godot Engine, by contrast, makes it really easy to stand up a prototype. Additionally, as one of my students put it, 3D in Godot Engine is fine, but 2D in Unreal Engine is a pain. A student also suggested that most students in CS315 would rather make 2D games than 3D anyway, especially given the extra complexities inherent in 3D game production.
I am not yet putting together formal course plans for Fall—that will came later. For now, I am undecided but leaning toward sticking with Godot Engine for another year. I have been approved to run another full-year immersive learning collaboration with Minnetrista: we will make prototypes in the Fall and produce a game in the Spring studio. Although CS315 is not part of this sequence, many CS majors come into CS490 via CS315. This will be a factor in my decision. I also have two outstanding grant proposals that would impact how I want to devote my own attention next academic year: it's much easier to teach an engine I am currently using than one I am not.
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