The Mirror, an open-source effort to create an open Roblox or Fortnite alternative that we first covered in 2022 has just announced a massive change. They are no longer going to be building on top of the free and open-source Godot game engine. Details of the changes from the Mirror blog:
We’ve made the extremely difficult decision to transition The Mirror from Godot.
First, I’d like to give a massive thank you to everyone in the community for putting in so much time to create amazing software for free. The next generation of software wouldn’t be possible without the often-unsung heroic work of open-source contributors donating their time to give everyone software free. It’s truly incredible and I can’t thank them enough.
There isn’t a single why, rather a combination of factors. For the technically-inclined, I’ve created a video reflecting on the past nearly 3 years (!) of development. I hope this can be helpful to anyone looking to build a multiplayer 3D game with evaluating key topics from a conceptual perspective, such as key architectural decisions and paradigms we made judgment calls on.
Key topics:
- Choosing the best tool for the job
- Tooling in various ecosystems
- Team size: How many cooks in the kitchen?
- Ecosystem crossover: Tooling of shared protocols, such as HTTP in ecosystem A vs. ecosystem B
- Certainties vs uncertainties, Godot 3 vs. Godot 4
- Should you choose Godot?
What’s next for The Mirror?
- Our V2 alpha is on its way. Join us on Discord where we’ll announce things first.
- We’ve updated our social handles to @TheMirrorEngine. Mirror “GDP” (game development platform) was a bit wordy and confusing.
- Real-time development is what we’re most excited about, and so we’ve updated our tagline to “Real-Time Engine” – a fundamentally better developer experience than today’s engine workflows. Reflections are in real-time.
- Hint: After our previous “Infinity” release, the next release will start with “J”.
Key Links
You can learn more about The Mirror and the move away from the Godot game engine in the video below.