Juan Linietsky, lead developer of the FOSS game engine Godot Engine has written a retrospective article while also going over future plans for Godot Engine.
The article goes over a some interesting points in the history of Godot, plenty of which I didn't know and I imagine not many others did. It's pretty incredible to see it go from this small hobby into an open source project that thanks to support from users (Patreon) and a few sponsors, now employs multiple people:
- Ignacio Roldán Etcheverry is employed part-time to work on C# thanks to a generous grant from Microsoft.
- Fabio Alessandreli is employed part-time to work on networking, web-sockets and HTML5 thanks to a generous award from Mozilla.
- Fernando Calabró (who made the art for the TPS demo) is now hired to create art for a new third person platformer demo. This is a bigger and more complex demo, which hopefully be done by the time Godot 4.0 is out.
- George Marques has recently been hired as a generalist thanks to community donations.
All those are in addition to Juan Linietsky working as Lead Developer and Rémi Verschelde working as Project Manager. We have to remember this is in quite a short amount of time too, they only setup their Patreon well into the second half of 2017 and within the first month their first goal to have Linietsky work full time was hit.
Now onto the more exciting bit, what does the future hold for Godot? Going by what Linietsky wrote, Godot Engine 4.0 is going to be due in 'mid 2020' which is the huge release that comes with their rendering overhaul with Vulkan. Much sooner though, Godot Engine 3.2 should be releasing this month with Verschelde handling it as Linietsky works on 4.0.
Great work to everyone involved. It's fun to watch a free and open source game engine evolve so quickly.
The Vulkan rendering overhaul can be done by then for sure, but there are a lot more open issues marked for 4.0 than just that.
I'd say 2020 sounds realistic, still, but I'd put my money on the last quarter.
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