Godot provides you with a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine for creating 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so users can focus on making games without having to reinvent the wheel.
Godot is completely free and open source under the permissive MIT license. There are no strings attached, no royalties, nothing. You own your games down to the last line of engine code.
Features
Based on the feature page of Godot, let’s do a quick rundown of Godot and what it offers 3D gamed developers:
- Godot is an IDE for 2D and 3D game development that relies on the object-oriented programming paradigm.
- The visual editor supports runtime editing.
- Entities in your project are organised as Node trees.
- Nodes can be composited in Scenes.
- Scenes support inheritance.
- Your game is made up of instantiated Scenes.
- Scene instancing enables teamwork.
Specifically for 3D graphics we learn that Godot:
- Uses an innovative rendering architecture.
- Supports spatial and screen based anti-aliasing.
- Features rich lighting effects for lit surfaces.
- Offers both pre-rendered and real-time global illumination.
- Allows mid- and post-processing of a scene.
- Includes a shader editor for the custom shader language.
Additionally:
- The Godot scripting language is Python-like. Syntax highlighting is supported by Github.
- Godot has full support for C# and community-driven support for additional languages.
- The entire API documentation comes with the installation.
- Changes are auto-saved when closing a project.
- Comes with everything you expect for debugging, including a network profiler.
- Supports desktop, mobile, web and game consoles.
- Includes XR support.
- Game projects are Git friendly.
I hope that answered your most high-level questions.