FOSS game engine "Godot Engine" making fantastic Vulkan API progress

Godot Engine developer Juan Linietsky continues pushing ahead with Godot's move to Vulkan, with another impressive progress report now available and it all sounds great.

Firstly, Linietsky goes over improvements to the lighting and shadows system, with Godot 4.0 having all "2D lighting is now done in a single pass", which will give it a decent performance although now there's a few limits in place but the improvements should be worth it. Additionally, they've added the ability to use "specular and shininess both as parameter and as textures supplied to Sprite, AnimatedSprite, Polygon2D and other nodes" for 2D lights.

Further improvements include a new 2D material system, which enables writing custom shaders with their fancy new Vulkan renderer and there's no restriction on the amount of textures shaders can use. As another performance boost, shaders are compiled and cached on load reducing game stalls. Shader compilation is also now fully threaded "greatly improving performance". There's more multi-threading work being done, with even more to come later too.

Now that they have their 2D engine with Vulkan mostly done, they're getting to work on the 3D side of Godot with Vulkan. With Godot 4.0 it's going to be faster, more capable and "smarter regarding resource allocation". They ended the post with a note that "August will be fully dedicated to the 3D rendering side of things, so stay tuned!"—exciting.

Read the full report here. You can also support their work on Patreon.