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

Please note this is not my project in the slightest, this engine is developed by a passionate team of individuals with a man named Reduz as the project lead.

I’m just a user.

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Godot 3.2.1 patch release

The first of what should be many such releases. The focus for this first one was fixing bugs that have slipped through, but smaller and/or otherwise safe features and enhancements will make their way in for future builds (at least until 4.0 stable comes out).

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(Godot 4.0) Custom Sky Shaders

As of the current builds, custom sky shaders can now be written in code. In addition, the sky shader itself saw a major upgrade with the introduction of the Preetham sky model along with support for up to 4 suns (so a Tatooine like planet is doable). It can also be updated in realtime for things like day/night cycles.

What should also be noted is that this is not Reduz’s work nor is it the work of Chaosus, showing a higher level of interest by the community to work on modern graphical features.

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I’ve been waiting to be able to create custom shaders for the sky, really cool. :slight_smile:

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Godot Refactoring; Month 2

This month was all about rewriting the window system, you can now make floating windows for certain editor functions (like scripting) and you can embed windows as well, all this being part of a massively streamlined OS class. The multiple window functionality applies to games and apps. made with Godot like usual (for instance, a ‘save’ window or a ‘settings’ window).

In addition, many 3D nodes now have new names to make clear the separation between 3D and 2D (Spatial is now Node3D for instance). There will be a system that auto-converts the nodes from existing projects.


Next month signals the return to Vulkan work.

hey guys im unable to download Godot 3.2.1 x64bit is it just me or what??
is there any mirror for download?

Must be a problem on your side, because it works for me. Perhaps try an different browser?

this never happened before but it looks like my public IP can not reach tuxfamily in my web browser i got ‘The connection has timed out’.

few minutes ago i used vpn to download yayy finally. What a strange…

Draw call batching for 2D games (GLES2).

And as the excerpt says, you won’t even need to wait until version 4 to have what amounts to a major optimization for the 2D engine. There’s no indication this will also be the case for games using GLES3, but GLES2 usually provides more than enough graphical bells and whistles for 2D anyway.

Global and Instance uniform types

In a nutshell…

  • When you set a Global uniform in one material, it becomes accessible to every material in the game. This allows the use of things like making an entire environment wet when it is raining, cutting plants, ect…
  • Instance uniforms meanwhile allow for variation among instances without making tons of new materials (ie. a forest where each tree’s canopy is green, yellow, or anywhere in between. There are some limitations like 16 such uniforms per shader and no texture value types though (but a couple of them are only there because of the dynamics involved in making things work across different platforms). Meanwhile, you can set the uniform index manually to help make everything work for multi-material objects.

There are also other long requested graphics features that did not get their own article, among them vastly improved shadows (with softness) and decal support.

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A lot a great stuffs are coming with Godot 4!
I hope to see a solid LOD system soon. There are some rumors but I can’t find any reel informations about it

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I see Godot is getting some features other engines have had for a long time now, but with each of these features, it gets more and more usable. I had a little play with Godot 2, and have seen some people doing nice things with 3, but I’m really looking forward to 4. The community seems very active and positive, and the rate of progress is quite impressive given their resources, so hopefully Godot will be as popular as Blender one day :slight_smile:

Vulkan Progress Report, number 7

The new things

  • new shadow algorithm that can do softness as well as perfect contact
  • SSS that just works, and has transmittance
  • fast decal rendering, use as many as you want
  • projection of images from lights
  • screen-space anti-aliasing
  • accurate frametime measurements
  • SSR roughness that works
  • low-level render API
  • 3D node renaming

Next up is a GPU-accelerated lightmapper and many other big features. The engine is still months away from Alpha, but good visuals for testing purposes can already be done.

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Powerful, GPU-based lightmapping

This is a completely modernized lightmapper, the main reason to use it instead of the overhauled GI-probes is performance and quality. The fact that it can use the GPU (with an option to use the CPU instead if needed) means the GI can be computed in seconds.

In addition, you can create so-called “interior” lightmaps for indoor spaces in the level, and have them blend seamlessly with the outdoor areas of a level.

Other new things include a better packing algorithm, multiple lightmaps can also exist in any given level (since they are based on Godot’s scene system and a level might be an assembly of scenes). The grid-based automatic placement of lightprobes is still there, but you can now place them manually if desired.

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If you are still looking for a sprite editor for making 2D games in Godot with, the guy behind Pixelorama has unveiled his biggest release yet (which is still made in Godot by the way).
https://www.orama-interactive.com/post/pixelorama-v0-7-is-out

Workflow and quality of life improvements across the board, and even a recovery option in case of a crash.

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Godot running in your internet browser

Unlike Construct and other engines, this will be an optional way to experience Godot and the desktop builds will remain the recommended way to use the engine. There are two main reasons why this is being worked on.

  1. Lowers the barrier to newcomers wanting to give the engine a shot (but are not ready to dive in fully), just open and run without adding any files to your hard-drive.
  2. Makes it easier to run Godot in highly controlled environments (ie. classrooms), getting Godot into the schools is considered a priority for the team.

This is only a prototype right now and it will not be fully usable until Godot 4.0 is released, but for those who just want to give the engine a quick evaluation, go for it.

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Godot 3.2.2


Not only does it have a ton of bugfixes, but it also brings new features and enhancements such as batching (for massive speedups in 2D games), C# support for iOS games, and more. There are a few incompatibilities due to API changes, but they are minor.

This release was preceded by 4 RC builds, as the Godot team really wanted to make sure there were no regressions (unlike certain commercial solutions).

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Next-Gen GI for Godot 4.0

You might be asking “wait, didn’t Reduz already develop a better GI system tor version 4?”. This isn’t the voxel GI, this is something called SDFGI, and not only is it far easier to use (in the environmental settings behind a checkbox rather than a dedicated node), but it is far higher quality with no light leaking and is able to work well with large scenes.

It looks good enough from the video that I would even request it as a feature for Eevee.

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Pretty sure this is the voxel GI he blogged about in November of last year. Or it’s what it evolved into. ‘SDFGI’ is Signed Distance Field Global Illumination. Signed Distance Fields are basically a voxelized representation of the 3D geometry, as you can see when he turns on the SDF Cascades view. As he said in the November Vulkan report they’re using a ‘very clever voxel lighting implementation using signed distance fields.’

The thing that’s interesting about this implementation is that the distance field representation gets its colouration from the materials of the object, which allows it to be used for pretty convincing reflections, and the distance fields don’t seem to be stored on a per-object basis with a fixed resolution, as in Unreal’s distance fields (though maybe they are and he just didn’t want to bother showing that part of the process).

I feel like that’s gotta come with a performance cost, if the distance fields are being generated at runtime, or even in real-time. If it can only run at 60fps on a 1060, it might not be suitable for VR, which would be a shame.

So basically what you are saying is that we need this added to blender by yesterday.

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