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While the big Godot Engine 3.1 release isn't out yet (soon), they're already working out a list of exciting features for the next few versions.

Taking to Twitter, Godot Engine head honcho Juan Linietsky has been posting about their plans. Turns out, there's a lot. Some of it sounds incredibly exciting too for a free and open source game engine. Talking about it, they said their aim is to make "Godot 4.0 2D and 3D rendering top notch with nothing to envy from the big guys (but still keeping it as easy to use as always)".

Here's just some of the things we might see later this year:

  • Vulkan support
  • Add Shader caching
  • Tessellation shaders
  • Post-processing shader support
  • God-rays for directional light
  • Planar Reflections
  • LOD and texture/mesh streaming
  • Add batching to the GLES2 back-end
  • Make 2D lighting work in one pass, to increase performance
  • A more modern SSAO algorithm
  • Take a look at PhysX, now it's open source

That's simply a taster going by what they posted in pictures and from replies to others, for more that is going to be added to their list. There's loads more too, see this Twitter post as well as this one for the list. These are only the plans from one developer too, it's not counting all the other parts that will be working on in the next development cycles.

Looks like 2019 is going to be a pretty huge year for the Godot Engine team, hopefully we will begin to see more people use it, especially with the 3.1 release just around the corner which has a beta available already.

Learn more about Godot Engine on the official site.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments

elmapul Jan 14, 2019
"Shader cache"
i'm not sure if i'm happy that it will have it, or disapointed to know it dont have it yet.

"Tessellation shaders"
i dont know if other engines have this feature as an shader or as something else.

"LOD and texture/mesh streaming"
i guess this is pretty new on other engines as well, by new, i mean its an current gen (ps4/xone gensfeature) feature
TheSHEEEP Jan 14, 2019
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Meanwhile, the features I am most waiting for:
Proper terrain/heightmap generation (currently, there's only an external plugin for this)
Actually usable navigation meshes (including dynamic updates and different agent sizes)

Are both planned for 3.2, so I guess also realistic to expect this year.
megaglest Jan 14, 2019
I'm just glad there is such an advanced open source game engine in the first place.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 14 January 2019 at 1:02 pm UTC
x_wing Jan 14, 2019
This shader caches implementation always makes noise to me. Anybody knows why do we need so many implementations of, whats looks like, the same thing? Isn't Mesa cache enough or there are differences between them?
axredneck Jan 14, 2019
Sadly these modern engines don't have good old BSP/brushes/sectors/patches/other options to create solid geometry it editor, so you need to create separate 3D models in Blender or import existing ones even for simple geometry.
razing32 Jan 14, 2019
Quoting: megaglestI'm just glad there is such an advanced open source game engine in the first place.

Did Liam edit your comment ?
Kimyrielle Jan 14, 2019
Having made a little game with it recently, I love this engine and I am excited for the new features, Vulkan support most of them all!
One thing I was missing lately is that the engine doesn't seem to support Steam controllers yet. At least get_connected_joypads() returns empty, even when Steam can see the controller. Also, built-in database support would be neat.
Natedawg Jan 14, 2019
Quoting: axredneckSadly these modern engines don't have good old BSP/brushes/sectors/patches/other options to create solid geometry it editor, so you need to create separate 3D models in Blender or import existing ones even for simple geometry.

Godot does have CSG support though :)
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-gets-csg-support
Liam Dawe Jan 14, 2019
Quoting: razing32
Quoting: megaglestI'm just glad there is such an advanced open source game engine in the first place.

Did Liam edit your comment ?
They were testing for XSS.
razing32 Jan 14, 2019
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: razing32
Quoting: megaglestI'm just glad there is such an advanced open source game engine in the first place.

Did Liam edit your comment ?
They were testing for XSS.

Oh ok , cool :P
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