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

I see you are a huge fan of the Godot engine, and that made me curious.
Do you know a visually pleasing game made with the Godot engine? I am interested in 3d (not platform style) were a first person can walk through a scene.

I looked for the same thing a while ago and I donā€™t think there is anything that can compare to AAA titles if that is what you mean.

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Uhm, when there is finally a AAA (intestingly ā€˜aā€™ not ā€˜anā€™ is used because you say ā€˜triple Aā€™ since Iā€™m being pedantic) company with the resources and skills to produce the quality youā€™re looking for in a AAA games, then no, much like with Blender in its earlier days as an aspiring open source programme. Godot is quietly becoming a favourite with Game Jammers, with some frankly amazing results considering time constraints and restricted assetsā€¦

The truth is Godot lacks of artists but having GI probe i think it is possible to achive such realistic lighting.

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I believe this is what you might be looking for? Something showing decent art made with godot. https://miskatonicstudio.com/

Itā€™s not exactly top studio visual quality, but itā€™s one of the best Iā€™ve seen that is actually released and playable. Reviews on steam suggest the puzzle design has flaws. I havenā€™t actually played it yet, so grain of salt, but it is free, FOSS, and made using a lot of CC or public domain assets so donā€™t expect to see something you might expect from a large publisher.

Godot 3.2 RC2

There was a showstopping bug in the GLES3 backend regarding irridiance map generation, so this fixes that along with the usual daily bugfixes.

Vulkan; Progress Report 6

After a two month vacation, Juan spent January bringing back the Post FX stack. SSAO now has a half resolution option, thereā€™s specular anti-aliasing, and the effects in general are improved. The month of February will bring the return of the final few features such as SSS (with a skin model this time).

Godot 3.2 released

After 10 months of work and with a far more expansive scope than originally planned, the Godot team is elated to announce the release of Godot 3.2. This release brings a ton of quality-of-life and other improvements and features to make this the best Godot yet. Months of bugfixing and betas meanwhile ensures your game dev. experience wonā€™t be wracked with major bugs and crashing issues.

This also means the merge of the Vulkan branch into master is imminent, and those wanting to tinker with the next generation of graphics will soon be able to do so when downloading from a daily build site.

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Justā€¦ what ??? Such a big surprise for a company known for the game engine giving money for an other game engine.

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One theory, as to the reason, is because Unreal is a heavyweight solution that is poorly suited for the easy and rapid development of non-AAA 3D games and 2D games. Even then, 250K is a drop in the bucket compared to what Fortnite is bringing in weekly. Then thereā€™s the fact that Unreal is by no means threatened by what is coming for Godot anyway.

The article states that Epic wants the money to go into graphics and GDscript enhancements, which will work fine for the Vulkan project and for the majority of developers. Epic has not yet made any demands for the BF to improve the position of Blender as a tool for development with Unreal, soā€¦


Also, thereā€™s reports that Godot is now the third most used engine for game-jam games and the fastest growing overall, which can be seen as a bellweather of sorts of where the indie development scene is heading.

GameMaker was the engine that more or less started the whole indie movement and for a long time was the choice for 2D, but if this graph is any indication, it is now bleeding users.

Thereā€™s also been a debate by some in the Godot community as to whether Juan should accept the money or tell Epic to take a hike. These people are FOSS purists who believe itā€™s a violation of FOSS spirit to take money from capitalists, which is the exact same type of thing weā€™ve seen here as the Blender development fund ballooned from corporate sponsorship.

They donā€™t seem to notice that the ā€˜greater goodā€™ funding from ā€˜the peopleā€™ has plateaued at the moment, so Epicā€™s donation is a nice shot in the arm for near-term projects. They are welcome to pour in truckloads of money if they think itā€™ll dilute any corporate influence.

I know a lot ā€œgamersā€ are hating on Epic because of the EPIC Store but all EPIC has done over the last year is take a lot of the Fortnite money and have paid it forward to the game development community. Whether itā€™s been making Megascans free, making their engine free and million dollar assets free, or contributing to open source projects like Blender and now Godot (did Krita get one too?).

These people should be the ones taking a hike. They donā€™t have to worry about choosing between whether to keep the lights on and feeding their families or pursuing their passion creating an open source game engine.

Unigine 2 is going to enter the market with a free model in about a month, that will flip things upside down.

Maybe, but I doubt itā€™s an easy to develop with experience, frankly. It will likely find itā€™s own niche.

If anyone wants another example of the emerging ecosystem of Open Source apps. literally made with Godot, then here is a pixel art and spriting app. named Pixelorama.

This could serve as your sprite and background editor when making 2D Godot games for instance. I could see this as eventually being more useful for this specific task than the GIMP (because itā€™s all about pixels).

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For those waiting to experiment with Vulkan (in the daily builds of master at least), the wait is over, Vulkan is in.

All you need to do is wait for build sites like this one to push out brand new builds.

Thereā€™s a lot more heavy refactoring work coming (involving Vulkan, GDscript, and other areas), so serious production work is not recommended. Donā€™t blame the devs. if you lose work or even lose your project because you didnā€™t make backups.

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Completely overhauled navigation (with NavigationServer)

While your old pathfinding scripts will still work, this brings the following to the tableā€¦

  • Dynamic path generation in changing environments
  • Realtime recalculation of navigation meshes
  • Obstable avoidance
  • Elimination of the need to manually get and integrate the path information
  • Simplified code for calculating the actual motion

This is also an example of devs. doing work sponsored by other companies (IMVU in this case).

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Refactoring, fundamentals, performance

This effort to modernize the core will continue through March with Vulkan work resuming in April. This is an article that every FOSS organization can take a page from, even the BF. Why? Because the Godot developers realize that having robust base technology needed by creators daily is just as important as the shiny stuff that makes pretty images and promotional material.

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Nice work !!!