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Godot Engine [Official Site] 3.0 is going to be a pretty big release for this open source game engine and the first release candidate is now available.

Godot Engine 3.0 will include:

  • Lightmapping - a cheap way to do Global Illumination
  • Onion Skinning
  • Bullet as their new physics backend
  • Autotiling for 2D tilemaps
  • VR and AR improvements, including support for OpenVR, OpenHMD and ARKit. Not all of which is complete though.
  • C# support
  • WebGL 2.0 and WebAssembly support
  • A new OpenGL ES 3.0 / OpenGL 3.3 renderer 

There's a lot more, that's just a few random highlights. They are hoping to have the final 3.0 release out this month. This release is a big thing for Godot, so hopefully it helps build an even better foundation for continued progress towards the best open source game engine.

See their announcement post here about the release candidate.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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STiAT Jan 15, 2018
A bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.
Doc Angelo Jan 15, 2018
Quoting: STiATA bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

I'm glad they didn't divide their resources to work on that. I doubt that it would be useful for the scope of this engine right now.
weaponx169 Jan 15, 2018
Maybe they can do a big release and add dream features by being funded by indiegogo.com or something like that. Maybe they could do free licences and pro licences to get money.
natewardawg Jan 15, 2018
Quoting: STiATA bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

It looks like Thomas Herzog will likely be working on that at some point in the future. But, it really didn't make much sense to support it yet since Vulkan doesn't work on all of Godot's target devices, but GLES3 does. So, I'm going to make a guess that it will start being worked on in about a year from now. This is probably a good move since there will be even more experience/documentation out there as to how to implement it best. I think it's an overall good thing to wait a little while for it if it's going to be in the engine for the long haul.

https://godotengine.org/article/please-help-us-reach-our-second-patreon-goal-so-we-can-hire-thomas-part-time

At the bottom of the above article it says, "[After re-implementing GLES2], Thomas will help improve the existing 2D and 3D renderers, as well as contemplating future platforms (such as Vulkan)."
Lefl Jan 15, 2018
Quoting: weaponx169Maybe they can do a big release and add dream features by being funded by indiegogo.com or something like that. Maybe they could do free licences and pro licences to get money.

Please no different licenses.
Spoiler, click me


Last edited by Lefl on 15 January 2018 at 2:26 pm UTC
natewardawg Jan 15, 2018
Quoting: Lefl
Quoting: weaponx169Maybe they can do a big release and add dream features by being funded by indiegogo.com or something like that. Maybe they could do free licences and pro licences to get money.

Please no different licenses.
Spoiler, click me

Agreed, I think indiegogo is a great idea! Licenses, however, would be a quick way to lose a lot of supporters... Why not just use Unity, Unreal, or CRYENGINE at that point?


Last edited by natewardawg on 15 January 2018 at 4:28 pm UTC
slaapliedje Jan 16, 2018
Quoting: Doc Angelo
Quoting: STiATA bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

I'm glad they didn't divide their resources to work on that. I doubt that it would be useful for the scope of this engine right now.

I'm fairly certain that SteamVR on Linux requires Vulkan, so doesn't that make their effort on getting VR support useless for Linux?
natewardawg Jan 16, 2018
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: Doc Angelo
Quoting: STiATA bit sad they dropped the idea of supporting Vulkan due to the amount of work involved for "not enough benefit" at the moment. We'll see, maybe that will change in the future.

I'm glad they didn't divide their resources to work on that. I doubt that it would be useful for the scope of this engine right now.

I'm fairly certain that SteamVR on Linux requires Vulkan, so doesn't that make their effort on getting VR support useless for Linux?

At face value I'm sure it doesn't look correct, but the VR support was added by Bastian Olij who I'm quite sure isn't a core team member. So, the reason we have it is because someone graciously gave up their time to add it. [edit] With that said, I don't think it *requires* Vulkan, but the performance will probably be much better once Godot has Vulkan :)

https://github.com/BastiaanOlij


Last edited by natewardawg on 16 January 2018 at 1:53 am UTC
beniwtv Jan 16, 2018
Quoting: slaapliedjeI'm fairly certain that SteamVR on Linux requires Vulkan, so doesn't that make their effort on getting VR support useless for Linux?

Not at all! SteamVR on Linux can run OpenGL VR games just fine, there are extensions to both OpenGL and Vulkan to share buffers directly. It works quite well, even on AMD. (And improvements still coming as well).

I am personally testing VR with Godot since some time on Linux, making sure it's working :D. Right now there is a bug in the code that makes Godot crash, but hopefully it can get resolved soon.


Last edited by beniwtv on 16 January 2018 at 10:30 am UTC
elmapul Jan 16, 2018
no shader is working on my rig...
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