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Due for the Godot Engine [Official Site] 4.0 release, Vulkan support sounds like it's coming along nicely for this FOSS game engine as detailed in the latest progress report.

While others are working towards Godot Engine 3.2 which is due later this year and already has some fun sounding features making it in like disabling editor features, pseudo 3D support in the 2D engine, convex decomposition, a new Android plugin system, major update to the Visual Shader editor and loads more work on Godot Engine 4.0 is already underway.

Lead developer Juan Linietsky wrote in a brand new progress report, that they're "almost exclusively" dedicating their time to porting the game engine to Vulkan. Sounds like it has been quite the task too, with work on getting Vulkan initialized taking "considerable effort" but it's now running "nicely".

To help with it, an entirely new RenderingDevice API has been made which should also allow other developers to override Godot's rendering code. Work on the 2D side with Vulkan is about "halfway" ported with 3D to begin around the end of the month.

Their current goal is for the rewritten rendering bits to be up to Godot 3.x levels by October, with "hard work and long hours" being done to achieve it. Hopefully they remember to take breaks, no one deserves to burn-out.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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9 comments

gradyvuckovic Jul 2, 2019
Go Godot! Woo!

Godot is such an awesome project, they are working furiously on that project, just look at the commits on their github. They're blazing through fixing issues, they've fixed over 1800 for version 3.2. This project is really going somewhere, I feel like this project is where Blender was at maybe 5 years ago.

Best thing about Godot is that first class Linux support. Editor and Game Engine. Even the exported Windows games run perfectly through Wine/Proton on Linux as far as I can tell, from testing my own projects.

I'm really hoping this project gets the support it deserves, it could mean really positive things in the long run for both game developers and gamers.
const Jul 2, 2019
I really hope the Pi4 will have good Vulkan support. Would love to develop some games for it and can imagine a nice homebrew community around godot and Pi in the future.
If I was still teaching people to program games, this would be a quite interesting combination.
TheSHEEEP Jul 3, 2019
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I just wish they would focus on more important things like the lack of proper 3D navigation before tackling stuff like Vulkan.
Oh, well... all in good time, I guess.
mike456 Jul 3, 2019
Quoting: gradyvuckovicGo Godot! Woo!

Best thing about Godot is that first class Linux support. Editor and Game Engine. Even the exported Windows games run perfectly through Wine/Proton on Linux as far as I can tell, from testing my own projects.

Wait, you say you can create Windows .exe from Linux? What about MacOs?
beniwtv Jul 3, 2019
Quoting: TheSHEEEPI just wish they would focus on more important things like the lack of proper 3D navigation before tackling stuff like Vulkan.
Oh, well... all in good time, I guess.

Only Juan is working on Vulkan at the moment, with help here and there from the community (for example, the community has patches for Windows and OSX Vulkan).

Other Godot developers are working on other areas, so it will come in due time, I am sure :)

If you have C++ experience, you can even help out if you want, it is really fun I found.
EDIT: Also, Godot's code base is really nicely organized, so it's easy to navigate around and find the stuff.


Last edited by beniwtv on 3 July 2019 at 7:26 am UTC
gradyvuckovic Jul 3, 2019
Quoting: mike456
Quoting: gradyvuckovicGo Godot! Woo!

Best thing about Godot is that first class Linux support. Editor and Game Engine. Even the exported Windows games run perfectly through Wine/Proton on Linux as far as I can tell, from testing my own projects.

Wait, you say you can create Windows .exe from Linux? What about MacOs?

Yup! You can export to Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS and HTML5, from Windows, Linux and Mac.

I work on Linux, and I regularly export Windows *.exe versions of my projects and send them via discord/dropbox to a person I make stuff with. It's awesome being able to just compile to any platform from any platform.
kvark Jul 3, 2019
QuoteSounds like it has been quite the task too, with work on it taking "considerable effort" but it's now running "nicely".

This is quoted out of context. If you read the original blog post, these comments are only relevant to the part of *initializing* vulkan, not running it.

Overall, I'm getting an impression that they are underestimating the difficulty of the task. Vulkan support can't be just "added". If you hope to get any benefits of this low-level API, you'd need to re-architect the entire application with the knowledge of new concepts. Getting it compiling is just 5% of the task, then goes the hard time of running it validation-free (in terms of vulkan validation), then optimizing to a point where it's actually faster than your old GL backend, and finally layers and layers of polish before it can be used in production. If they can pull it off as easily with a single person in a few month - my hat off to them.
Liam Dawe Jul 3, 2019
Quoting: kvark
QuoteSounds like it has been quite the task too, with work on it taking "considerable effort" but it's now running "nicely".

This is quoted out of context. If you read the original blog post, these comments are only relevant to the part of *initializing* vulkan, not running it.
I don't agree that it's out of content, as I did not mention any specific part. Getting Vulkan initialized is part of the work, they said that took "considerable effort" so what I wrote is accurate. Either way, I've now adjusted it slightly to mention that so specifically, even if it's being quite pedantic ;)
Kors Jul 4, 2019
I really like this Game Engine. Im using and studing it on a day regular basis.
Hope Vulkan arrives as soon as possible on Godot.
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