Godot Engine - Godot 4.0 development enters feature freeze ahead of the first beta
With Alpha 13 now out, the long-awaited shift from accruing features to bugfixing and stability will start next week. They still don’t recommend using version 4 for production work until the RC stage, but it is stable enough now to experiment with. The betas will begin before the start of Fall.
Godot Engine - Godot 3.5: Can’t stop won’t stop
There are a lot of new features awaiting related to graphics, navigation, text rendering, and more. There have also been a number of major improvements that have been done such as work to eliminate shader-related stuttering as much as possible. The developers have put a lot of effort to port as many production-ready Godot 4 features as possible, save for ones like SDFGI which can only be done in Vulkan.
Citing the recent news, I have decided to redo my old game project from the ground up in Godot 3.5 instead of Godot 4 now (as the backporting team has shown itself to be so impressive that much of version 4 may already have been ported by the time it becomes stable enough to release).
Ever since they got the build system for 3.x releases going, the release logs have only gotten bigger in spite of the version 4 work.
Godot is now getting its own version of the Blender Institute (a commercial entity called W4 Games).
Before anyone assumes the worst, let me tell you that there is no way you can have hundreds of contributors write patches for years (on a regular basis) only to have the rug pulled out (as the devs. would never hear the end of it). This for starters will allow a better way for developers to publish to consoles (not their fault the rules are as unfriendly to FOSS as they are).
As I mentioned, I highly doubt any monetization will go beyond what is already seen for Blender (ie. a few proprietary plugins optimized for large teams ect…), as otherwise it would almost guarantee the creation of a Godot fork.
Also watch the whole video, the Gamesfromscratch guy made a joke that sounds pretty frightening if you do not get the context.
One final thing, there is also another reason why one should not be concerned about existing features going behind a paywall, and that is because it would be incredibly unethical to do that to code that many contributors have applied changes, fixes, and additions to (which includes even Godot 4’s Vulkan renderer). If that ever happened the new business would be immediately crushed by lawsuits.
The main reason behind the creation of a commercial entity is pragmatic: developing and publishing a game on consoles requires you to sign an NDA. This is incompatible with the opensource model of Godot. Thus the need of creating a commercial entity that can take care of this part, offering an official way of preparing and publishing a game on consoles using Godot without violating that NDA. And that is what will be monetized: developer and enterprise support for Godot.
I don’t think it is their intention to develop other proprietary stuff on top of Godot, as even their announcement says that they will focus on what Godot cannot legally offer (console support).
the first joke he made was just delivered so perfectly 
Loved it.
Not sure if this was already posted here ( I found it out a few weeks ago ) but Godot 4 has Blender support.
Godot 4 Gets Blender Support! | Lets Look At Godot 4.0 - YouTube
Isn’t it just smooth integration of glTF exporter/importer wrapper for .blend like Unity does it with .blend via fbx?
But thats nice anyway.
Anyway, its interesting decision to remove fbx support in favor of glTF converter.
Godot Engine - Dev snapshot: Godot 4.0 alpha 17
This could in fact be the end of the line for Godot 4 alpha. That means the backlog for the inclusion of pull requests is about done and the beta could very well be out within the next few weeks. For those who don’t want to make the jump now, a patch release for Godot 3.5 (in the RC stage) is being prepared as well.
This is it folks, the thread rename to mention the 4.0 beta release and the post with the news link will happen soon.
Bump version to 4.0-beta \o/ · godotengine/godot@20d6672 (github.com)
Oh man …Waiting for Godot came to and end? ;D
Godot Engine - The next big step: Godot 4.0 reaches Beta
The news article also contains the general rundown of the major new features (though with shiny new imagery). As long as you make a backup of your project, it is probably by now okay to convert it to version 4 as long as it is not too far along. Projects later in their development cycle meanwhile should remain on 3.x until the RC stage at the earliest.
If you do port a project over, be prepared to do some manual work fixing things missed by the converter, but at least the focus is now about bugfixing and performance, so the overall quality should not be so much in flux anymore.
I will start my first project in Godot 4 today. I am curious to see how the new workflow using blend files directly in the resource folder alluded to. Hopefully it actually works, unlike my previous attempts. Tight integration would be great. I am eagerly waiting for my new GPU so I can finally complete my new 3D printed SFF workstation build…
Props to the Godot Devs for hitting this milestone!!!
Hi Dorro, did that work for you?
Not so much, seems a little slow and I had problems initially with install paths, I was using a flatpak install of Blender for auto updates. However, only had a cursory go at making it work as I am trying finalise my current 3.5 project before moving on to 4 and have been a little obsessed with one of my OpenSCAD prototyping projects…
Godot Engine - Emulating Double Precision on the GPU to Render Large Worlds
With Godot 4’s new ability to create very large worlds on a wide variety of hardware, you will never run out of space to create. The example scene for instance shows fluid motion 10,000 kilometers from the world origin, which means you can create entire planets on a real-world scale. For everything short of a full-scale space sim, this should be enough for the vast majority of needs.
Paper about how the SDFGI works.
Godot SDFGI.pdf | DocDroid
Want to learn/give feedback to improve it?
-https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/1583780332524146692?cxt=HHwWiMDQpcf02_orAAAA
Godot Engine - Godot’s Graduation: Godot moves to a new Foundation
The team working on Godot is officially leaving the Free Software Conservancy behind, in its place will be the new Godot Foundation based in the Netherlands (yes, not far from the Blender Foundation’s office).
Fun fact, among the people to help get the ball rolling for Godot is Mr. Blender, Ton himself (by way of introducing them to the FSC so they can start receiving donations). This also furthers the realization of the Netherlands becoming a sort of mecca for the FOSS world because Krita too is based there.
I wonder if they are going to set up a fund similar to the Blender fund and use the Blender fund as a blueprint for it like Krita did.
I think I would join it. I don’t use Godot but really want them to succeed. At the moment the only way to do monthly donations is via Patreon and I don’t want to join Patreon.