Godot 4.2 released; A brand new era of FOSS game creation software

Alpha 4 is imminent.

Edit: Alpha 4 is available. There will be a 5th then Godot will go into Beta. Get versions from:
https://downloads.tuxfamily.org/godotengine/3.1/

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Fairly informative comments some from reduz himself:

Official terrain (C++ ?) might be looked at after the 3.1 release. Hope they look into LOD, culling / draw reduction too.

Edit: Alpha 5 is out now, available via the post above.

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I hope he does a forward thinking implementation of terrain instead of a generic heightmap system (ie. perhaps based on voxels with an adaptive resolution feature).

The guys over at Unity recently redid their terrain system, but missed the opportunity to allow the easy creation of caves and sheer cliffs with overhangs (instead going for another heightmap approach).

CryEngine2 (Crysis) had a voxel object for this sort of thing. Guess the tech is out of favour across engines atm.

Godot 3.1 hits beta, new development snapshot.

The official 3.1 release is getting close and the target for release is the end of January (to get it out in time for Godot Con).

Another reason is because the devs. tend to be busy with PR and other things as the time of the Game Developers Conference approaches, so having it out will be good for all users.

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Iā€™ve been dabbling with this engine for a few days now, trying my hand at a 2D platformer and damn, itā€™s cool. Never used a game engine before but GDScript is super easy (almost identical to Python, at least in my basic usage) and the methods provided (move and slide, etc) are really handy. They do the heavy lifting but you still have control over their behaviour. Same goes for the tilemap node for level layout. Iā€™m having a lot of fun. :slight_smile:

Meanwhile in the plugin departmentā€¦

Someone created a free addon for textured yet freeform 2D shapes and lines (which feature-for-feature matches the equivalent in Unity).

Get it here.
https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/296

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Here, a couple of threads discussing the development roadmap, features, and priorities.

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Much of the list makes for a very promising roadmap, but I donā€™t see why Godot canā€™t just use Bullet Physics for everything and use the time saved to get the other items done and make the Bullet implementation mult-threaded and/or powered by OpenCL.

Even if Reduz saves a lot of time on physics work by borrowing a lot of the math from Bullet, Iā€™m not sure if it will mean the custom one doing the better job. Besides that, the engine already has Andrea Catania doing all of the work in that area.


Another thing, I understand Reduzā€™s position on occlusion culling. I tried it once in an old BGE project and decided not to use it because it caused objects a fair distance from the scene origin to flicker like crazy. To actually do it right is quite tricky.

https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-3-1-beta-2 Beta 2 is out, release is aiming for months end. Builds are available here:

Saw PhysX mentioned, as well as the ability / framework to replace it with gamedevs_preferred middleware. I imagine theyā€™re weighing hardware / platform and license compatibility as well as performance here. :crossed_fingers:

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Godot 3.1 beta 3 is out

Reduz and Akien have been putting in long hours to help get community submitted bugfixes in as well as smashing bugs themselves. If you want a good quality 3.1 release, then keep reporting any bug you find.

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Just to note, GDquest has been pumping out new tutorials as of late (2D and 3D).
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ/videos

They also have an ongoing Kickstarter where they hope to pump out tons more learning material in the coming months.

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Beta 4 is out.
GodotCon Brussels 2019 presentations are being uploaded.
Some Godot devs met with some Blender devs. Anyone have details to share about it?

Edit: Multithreaded rendering is working across platforms now.
This is cool:

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That reminds me, I updated the first post to point to a working site with daily Godot builds (downloading the nightlies should be fairly safe for your project until 3.1 is released).

Beta 5

Many bug fixes have been made since Beta 4. However, I would still recommend using Calinouā€™s daily builds until the release because the latest commit in there is a couple days old (which means a number of very recent fixes wonā€™t be present).

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Beta 6

If you think the Godot guys have gone crazy with beta releases, the article indicates it is part of the plan to help kill as many bugs as possible. Unfortunately, this beta has a serious issue related to physics and performance because even though it got fixed, the commit is not in this build. The choice is to either wait for beta 7 or download the latest from Calinouā€™s site.

Call for content; Godot Engine 2019 showreel

Itā€™s showreel time again, submit a video of gameplay from one of your projects (in HD preferably) for a chance to have it display what Godot can do.

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Going crazy with betas, Beta 7

The main things here is the serious show-stopping issue was fixed along with at least 20 other bugs. They plan on keeping up with the frequent releases until they reach the desired stability for 3.1ā€™s release. This means a number of bugs of low severity will see their fixes bumped to 3.2 (or at least to a patch release).

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And one more, Beta 8

Made just a few days later, but with dozens of bugs (including a few major ones) fixed. The github page shows thereā€™s still issues that need fixing before the release can be done, but the reason for all of these betas is to make sure people pound away as often as possible.

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Beta 10

Forgot to mention Beta 9, but Beta 10 is out so there is no need.

Many more bugs have been smashed (with some of them serious GLES2 bugs) and the devs. are aggressively working to get 3.1 ready for release.

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