Go would probably be my 2nd choice. I haven't used it much but my initial impression was that it felt kind of boring to write with, and a hello world would end up being a ~2mb binary which put me off a bit. I could give it another shot in the future, but I'm busy enjoying Nim so that probably won't be any time soon.
Battery life is really good, on par with Windows on my current laptop. For some reason battery life was really bad on Bazzite, like 30% worse or so. I don't know how it compares to other distros.
Yup, it has a lot of great changes and fixes that I'm anticipating. Things like tilemap collision chunking, better UI scaling, proper SVG support, big 3D improvements, etc.
Something people don't mention in the comments is that codeacademy is only really for learning the very basics of programming. It's great if you're just getting started and have no idea how to program, but once you start getting into more intermediate territory these gamified services lose their appeal.
Codeacademy is cool if you're looking for a crash course into programming essentials, but if you really want to get into it I'd recommend buying a course.
First time I've heard of Hardcover, it looks promising!
There hasn't been movement on terrain editors, but there is one or two popular addons for terrains that have gotten good improvements. I think Terrain3D is the most popular.
For level streaming, the devs said they need to rework a lot inside the engine for it to happen, it's a long-term goal. There's been a lot of improvements to the codebase and especially performance in 4.5, but yeah it's not quite there yet. I wouldn't recommend the engine if you're trying to do something open-world or with huge levels.
Not mentioned in this post but if anyone was thinking about using 4.4 for web exports, wait a little more. There's still a pretty bad issue with audio cackling that hasn't been fixed yet (though there's a PR submitted for it, so it might make it to beta 3).
I can't wait for the new game tab. There's been at least a few times where I needed to go through something frame-by-frame to see what's going on.
Go-dows
Fixed, thanks for reporting.
Pretty interesting, reminds me of Vintage Story. Thanks for sharing.
Unreal 2.5 is so old, your perception of engines is probably way outdated. Things are so much easier and more cohesive now, you'll definitely enjoy modern gamedev tools. Since you're already an experienced programmer you should be up and running with Godot in only an hour, there's a tutorial in the official documentation that you can skim. You can probably look into a Godot crash course video on youtube too for a quick overview.