I'm not sure what you're wanting out of an entity, but they provide more than sprites, so your idea of what Grid provides is not an accurate representation of what the engine does.[1]
I appreciate what Godot provides, but we are not interested in building IDEs, because an IDE is not a game engine. We would rather have features that contribute to games than nice editors, which everyone else already builds. Why would we compete with Tiled? Just go use Tiled. We're not competing with 2D animation software either, just go use them, export those files, and see them reload in the engine in real-time.
If Lua is good enough for for major game studios, and nginx, and other software used by the Fortune 500, it's good enough for us.
The point of Planimeter's Grid Engine isn't to provide a game engine for Lua, despite its tagline, it's to provide a game engine that you can build a game with, out of the box, with opt-in multiplayer as simple as setting `maxplayers`.
You cannot do that with Unity 2D. You can't even do it with Unreal. There is no starting up those engines within 5 minutes, launching a server, having a friend connect, and modifying entities in real-time scripting and having them see those changes.
You receive an abstraction over `:spawn()`, `:update(dt)`, and `:draw()`, and can `:getNetworkVar()` and `:setNetworkVar()` for entities, which automatically serializes and sends data and lets the engine perform engine-level, not framework-level decisions on those entities.
They tie into a save restore lifecycle, and have optional physics, that you make a single call to and it's all networked.
Even if you didn't want to do top-down or side-scroller games with this, you have all of the out of the box engine-level mechanics for building card games, strategy games, or anything else in 2D.
To my knowledge, you cannot do that, even with Unreal out-of-the-box.
I think you’re looking at the front-page examples and thinking this is what the engine does, but really it was put up to show a parallel between Grid and LOVE’s front page examples to show how one graduates from sprites, audio, and printing text to networkable entities, emitting networked spacial audio, and creating GUI elements that are composite rasterized.
The fact that they look as simple as they do is the point.
You seem to think this is an afternoon hobby project, but it’s a very old product.
We of course need to update our documentation and marketing to make that all clear, but the parent company has larger priorities and we bring in more revenue than Godot; Grid just isn’t a primary revenue stream.
I wasn't trying to personally attack your engine or anything. I've been there, I've tried many of the comparable frameworks available for games in a variety of languages. They all offer much the same thing. Drawing primitives, physics primitives, vectors, bounding boxes, simple ways to draw sprites or textures to the screen, some basic UI containers, some math functions, a built in camera, some animation helpers, a player class that wraps input, basoc network functions, utility classes, essentially, exactly the same thing most game engines and framework offer.
In the end it comes down to whatever's the easiest, most efficient to use to get a final product. It's the only thing that really matters when it comes to a tool.
If two tools offer the same things, but one tool offers the ability to do it faster, more easily and more efficiently, that's the ideal tool of choice.
I appreciate what Godot provides, but we are not interested in building IDEs, because an IDE is not a game engine. We would rather have features that contribute to games than nice editors, which everyone else already builds. Why would we compete with Tiled? Just go use Tiled. We're not competing with 2D animation software either, just go use them, export those files, and see them reload in the engine in real-time.
If Lua is good enough for for major game studios, and nginx, and other software used by the Fortune 500, it's good enough for us.
The point of Planimeter's Grid Engine isn't to provide a game engine for Lua, despite its tagline, it's to provide a game engine that you can build a game with, out of the box, with opt-in multiplayer as simple as setting `maxplayers`.
You cannot do that with Unity 2D. You can't even do it with Unreal. There is no starting up those engines within 5 minutes, launching a server, having a friend connect, and modifying entities in real-time scripting and having them see those changes.
You receive an abstraction over `:spawn()`, `:update(dt)`, and `:draw()`, and can `:getNetworkVar()` and `:setNetworkVar()` for entities, which automatically serializes and sends data and lets the engine perform engine-level, not framework-level decisions on those entities.
They tie into a save restore lifecycle, and have optional physics, that you make a single call to and it's all networked.
Even if you didn't want to do top-down or side-scroller games with this, you have all of the out of the box engine-level mechanics for building card games, strategy games, or anything else in 2D.
To my knowledge, you cannot do that, even with Unreal out-of-the-box.
I think you’re looking at the front-page examples and thinking this is what the engine does, but really it was put up to show a parallel between Grid and LOVE’s front page examples to show how one graduates from sprites, audio, and printing text to networkable entities, emitting networked spacial audio, and creating GUI elements that are composite rasterized.
The fact that they look as simple as they do is the point.
You seem to think this is an afternoon hobby project, but it’s a very old product.
We of course need to update our documentation and marketing to make that all clear, but the parent company has larger priorities and we bring in more revenue than Godot; Grid just isn’t a primary revenue stream.
[1]: https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/api/entity