How does Godot, uh, "work"?

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+2 votes

I'm new to game engines, but not software development. I've gone through the series of the latest official Godot tutorial videos. I started going through .tscn, .gd, and .project files to see what was in there and how it was organized. I'd like to know more about Godot. I'm not sure what it is exactly that I'm looking for. I think it's "technical documentation".

I'm interested in knowing how Godot organizes and actually does all the calculations between frames. How does it keep track of which methods/functions need to be called? Does it first go through all the signals that exist to see if any are active and a function needs to be called? Or does it go through each script for each instance of each scene and see which functions need to be called that time?

I'm not asking for anyone to explain this to me, but does this information exist anywhere? Or should I just start going through the code and trying to figure it out? I've tried searching, but I can't seem to find this.

Thanks

Godot version 3.3
in Engine by (14 points)

5 Answers

+1 vote

I'm not sure if this information exists. I was going to suggest the docs but you said you've tried searching so I assume the docs don't have anything about it either.

Maybe you can give it a shot on the official Discord server. There seem to be a dedicated channel for engine development (It's called "engine-source"). You can try asking there.

by (182 points)
+1 vote

I have the same issue. At some point when working on my projects I need more in-depth information about the inner workings of the godot engine.

One resource I found helpful were articles posted by the main devs. This one explains a bit more about how the engine is built / works.

https://godotengine.org/article/why-does-godot-use-servers-and-rids

It's not much and might create more questions than answers but it's a bit more in-depth than what is in the docs.

Another idea would be reading the release notes / news thread.

by (72 points)
edited by
0 votes

There is some documentation about the engine internals here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/development/cpp/index.html

by (12,878 points)
0 votes

In addition to the articles listed above, I found this source code walkthrough really helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RIPRlCvRAk

by (14 points)
0 votes
by (810 points)
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