Release of the Godot 4.0 open source game engine

After four years of development, the release of the free game engine Godot 4.0 is published, suitable for creating 2D and 3D games. The engine supports an easy-to-learn game logic job language, a graphical game design environment, a one-click game deployment system, rich animation and physics simulation capabilities, a built-in debugger, and a performance bottleneck detection system. The code of the game engine, game development environment and related development tools (physics engine, sound server, 2D/3D rendering backends, etc.) are distributed under the MIT license.

The engine was source coded in 2014 by OKAM, after ten years of developing a professional grade proprietary product that has been used to create and publish many games for PC, game consoles and mobile devices. The engine supports all popular stationary and mobile platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS, Wii, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PS Vita, Android, iOS, BBX), as well as web game development. Ready-to-run binary builds are generated for Linux, Android, Windows, and macOS.

The Godot 4.0 branch includes about 12 changes and 7 bug fixes. About 1500 people took part in the development of the engine and writing the documentation. Among the key changes:

• Two new rendering backends (clustered and mobile) based on the Vulkan graphics API are proposed to replace the backends that render through OpenGL ES and OpenGL. For older and low-end devices, an OpenGL-based compatibility backend has been integrated using the new rendering architecture. For dynamic rendering at lower resolutions, AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) supersampling technology is used, using spatial scaling and detail reconstruction algorithms to reduce image quality loss when upscaling and converting to higher resolution. A rendering engine based on Direct3D 12 has been implemented, which will improve support for Windows and Xbox platforms.
• Added the ability to work with the interface in multi-window mode (various panels and parts of the interface can be detached as separate windows).
• Added a new user interface editor and a new visual design widget.
• Added a new theme editor.
• The lighting and shadow management system has been completely rewritten to use real-time SDFGI (Signed Distance Field Global Illumination) technology. The quality of rendering shadows has been significantly improved.
• The GIProbe node used to fill the scene with reflected light has been replaced with a VoxelGI node, which is optimal for real-time lighting processing in scenes with small to medium room interiors. For low-powered hardware, the ability to pre-render lights and shadows using lightmaps has been left, which now uses the GPU to accelerate the rendering.
• Implemented new rendering optimization techniques. Added automatic occlusion culling that dynamically detects and removes models hidden behind other surfaces to improve rendering performance and reduce CPU and GPU load.
• Added SSIL (Screen Space Indirect Lighting) mode to improve rendering quality on high-performance hardware by improving the handling of dark areas and indirect lighting. In addition, additional settings are provided for simulating diffuse indirect lighting using the SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) technique, such as choosing the level of influence of direct light.
• Realistic lighting units are proposed, allowing you to adjust the light intensity and use standard camera settings, such as aperture, shutter speed and ISO, to control the brightness of the final scene.
• Added new level editing tools for 2D games. A radical change has been made to the XNUMXD game development process. A new tilemap editor has been added, which has support for layers, landscape autocompletion, randomized placement of plants, stones and various objects, flexible selection of objects. Unified work with tile maps and sets of fragments for building a map (tileset). Fragments in a set are automatically expanded to eliminate gaps between adjacent fragments. A new function for placing objects on the stage has been added, which, for example, can be used to add characters to the cells of the tile grid.
• 2D rendering introduces the ability to use canvas groups to blend overlapping canvas elements, for example, you can combine multiple sprites together and blend them into the background as if the sprites were a single element. Added Clip Children property to allow any 2D element to be used as a mask. An option has also been added to the 2D engine that allows you to use the MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing) method to improve image quality and create smoother edges.
• Improved work with lighting and shadows in 2D games. Significantly improved performance when using multiple light sources. Added the ability to simulate three-dimensionality by changing the level of lighting on the normal maps, as well as creating visual effects such as long shadows, halos and sharp outlines.
• A volumetric fog effect has been added that uses a temporal projection technique to achieve a realistic look and high performance.
• Added cloud shaders to dynamically generate clouds that change in real time.
• Implemented support for "decals", a method of projecting material onto a surface.
• Added gamespace-wide particle effects that use the GPU and support attractors, collisions, trails, and emitters.
• Expanded interface options for visual editing of shaders.
• The shader language has been expanded to include support for structures, preprocessor macros, shader substitution (include statement), unified arrays, and using "varying" to pass data from a fragment handler to a lighting handler.
• Added the ability to use compute shaders that use the GPU to speed up algorithms.
• In the GDScript scripting language, the static typing system has been improved, a new property definition syntax has been added, the await and super keywords have been proposed, map / reduce operations have been added, a new annotation system has been implemented, and it has become possible to use unicode characters in variable names and function names. Added a tool for automatic documentation generation. Improved performance and stability of GDScript runtime. The development environment provides the ability to show several errors at once, new warnings for common problems have been added.
• The possibilities for developing game logic in C# have been expanded. Added support for .NET 6 and C# 10. Scalar values ​​use 64-bit types. Many APIs have moved from int and float to long and double. Provided the ability to define signals in the form of C# events. Added the ability to develop GDEExtensions in C#.
• Added experimental support for extensions (GDExtension), which can be used to extend the capabilities of the engine without rebuilding it and without making changes to the code.
• Proposed by default is its own engine for simulating physical processes Godot Physics, optimized for solving problems typical of computer games, and brought to parity in functionality with the previously used Bullet engine (for example, processing of new collision forms, support for a height map and the ability to use nodes have been added to Godot Physics SoftBody for clothing simulation). Performance has been optimized and the use of multithreading has been expanded with load sharing on different CPU cores when simulating physical processes in 2D and 3D environments. Many simulation issues have been resolved.
• A new text rendering system has been proposed that provides more control over text cropping and wrapping, as well as providing high definition at any screen resolution.
• Expanded tools for localization and work on translation.
• Added a separate dialog for importing 2D and 3D resources that supports previewing and changing the settings of the imported scene, materials and physical properties.
• New widgets have been added to the editor, such as a panel for reverting changes and a new dialog for choosing a color and updating a palette.
• Updated inspection interface, scene control panel and script editor. Syntax highlighting has been improved, the ability to display multiple cursors has been added, tools for editing JSON and YAML formats have been provided.
• The Animation Editor has been enhanced to include support for shape blending and improved Bezier curve-based workflows. Rewrote 3D animation code to support compression to reduce memory consumption. Rewritten system for mixing animations and creating transition effects. Expanded options for creating complex animations. Animation libraries are proposed for storing and reusing the created animations.
• Added a movie mode that renders the scene frame-by-frame at maximum quality for intros and video recording.
• Support for 3D helmets and virtual reality platforms has been expanded. Support for the OpenXR standard, which defines a universal API for creating virtual and augmented reality applications, is built into the core of the engine. All popular 3D headsets are supported on Windows and Linux, including SteamVR, Oculus and Monado.
• The stability of the subsystem for organizing a network game has been improved and the process of developing multiplayer games has been simplified.
• The capabilities of the sound system have been expanded, support for polyphony has been built in, an API for speech synthesis has been added, and the ability to loop the sound has been implemented.
• The ability to run the Godot interface on Android tablets and in a web browser is provided.
• A new game build system for various CPU architectures has been added. For example, you can now build for Raspberry Pi, Microsoft Volterra, Surface Pro X, Pine Phone, VisionFive, ARM Chromebook, and Asahi Linux.
• The API has been modified to break compatibility. The transition from Godot 3.x to Godot 4.0 will require a redesign of applications, but the Godot 3.x branch has a long support cycle, the duration of which will depend on the demand for the old API by users.

Source: opennet.ru