Boy, how time flies. It feels like it was only yesterday when the Godot Engine’s X (Twitter) account decided to get political in what are incredibly divisive times. Instead of focusing on making the best engine possible, it would seem politics were so important to the company that some of its workers freaked out and went on a blocking and banning spree, even banning top-level contributors from the project.
However, in the world of FOSS, forks are not only a necessity when code is abandoned, but they are also a viable option to duplicate code in order to avoid irresponsible teams. As you can imagine, thanks to Godot’s very public mismanagement, many forks of Godot were created, but one stands above the rest: Redot Engine. Not only is the Redot fork apolitical, ensuring anyone can contribute, but its team has spent the last year proving that the engine has the legs for longevity. As it celebrates its first anniversary with a fresh beta release and a hard fork of Godot 4.5 known as REX, all eyes are clearly looking to the future, which is precisely what a team leading a game engine should be doing.
Redot’s 4.4 beta is here
Source: Redot
After the third alpha for Redot 4.4 dropped in August, the first beta is now ready two months later in October. The announcement states it is a standard bug fix release that is primarily focused on animations (changelog here). It even appears that alpha builds will be going away in the future to help speed up the process.
After a year of Redot, the engine is looking to pick up the pace
Overall, it would appear that a faster release schedule is planned, focusing on Beta and RC releases in order to catch up to Godot (currently on 4.5 stable). It would seem it took Redot almost a year to get from the first beta of 4.3 last October to the newly released beta for 4.4. So if you’re hoping for quicker updates to drop, it certainly looks like they are in the cards as the project tightens its reins on releases.
ReX Engine is nearing its first alpha, but it’s not here yet
Source: Redot
It’s also worth noting that Redot Experimental, otherwise known as ReX Engine, which is a hard fork of Godot 4.5 (opposed to the soft fork that is Redot that’s focused on stability), will allow more freedom to add features that aren’t currently compatible with Redot, aiming for “peak performance.” Basically, it sounds like ReX is shaping up to offer highly requested features like a 3D Terrain Editor and Visual Scripting, though the first alpha is still in the works, things assuredly sound promising with notable performance boosts that are already measurable over Godot.
Redot’s community shows no signs of wavering
To be honest, not every fork of every project tends to last. In fact, most die out rather quickly, so to still see Redot not only kicking, but also picking up the pace after a year, is encouraging, to say the least. Nobody wants to bet on creating a game with an engine that may die any day, but in the end, that is why Redot’s community is still here. Godot played its hand, showing the engine isn’t a safe bet, so greener apolitical pastures were created. If that’s the type of project you’d like to support, you can easily head on over to Redot Engine’s Ko-fi page to make a donation.
Redot Engine
