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Godot Engine 4.0 gets a Movie Maker

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With Godot Engine 4.0 slowly approaching release, the developers are still hooking up some huge features to this free and open source game engine like a Movie Maker. This is something other game engines have too, so it's nice to see it land in Godot. This should make it easier for developers to make trailers of games, and use Godot for other projects too.

From their blog post it could be used for:

  • Recording game trailers for promotional use.
  • Recording cutscenes that will be displayed as pre-recorded videos in the final game. This allows for using higher quality settings (at the cost of file size), regardless of the player's hardware.
  • Recording procedurally generated animations or motion design. User interaction remains possible during video recording, and audio can be included as well (although you won't be able to hear it while the video is recording).
  • Comparing the visual output of graphics settings, shaders, or rendering techniques in an animated scene.

Some advantages they listed instead of just plain recording gameplay:

  • Use any graphics settings (including extremely demanding settings) regardless of your hardware's capabilities. The output video will always have perfect frame pacing; it will never exhibit dropped frames or stuttering. Faster hardware will allow you to render a given animation in less time, but the visual output remains identical.
  • Render at a higher framerate than the video's target framerate, then post-process to generate high-quality motion blur. This also makes effects that converge over several frames (such as temporal antialiasing, SDFGI and volumetric fog) look better.

They also showed an example video made with it:

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Godot 4.0 is shaping up to be a truly ridiculously big upgrade for game developers. Earlier this month the 4th Beta of Godot 4.0 went out.

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9 comments

twinsonian Nov 16, 2022
The github page shows over 5k open issues. I love this engine and everything that is going on with it, but I hope at some point they really focus on polishing bugs and issues before adding more features. The idea of a movie maker is really cool, but aren't there already tools for creating game trailers etc? I don't know why this would be at the top of the list.

One no brainer is to allow importing of resources, specifically sound files during run time. One use case example would be a music or beat game or in game custom music folder to load and play music at run time. Or a custom level editor where you can pick the music per level or import custom music. The point is, this has been an issue for a long time and a few google searches will show multiple open/closed issues and forum postings on it.

This is just an example of many requests that in my opinion make a lot of sense. A movie maker was honestly something that I would never have guessed if someone asked me to write a top 10 list of features needed.
itscalledreality Nov 16, 2022
Quoting: twinsonianThe github page shows over 5k open issues. I love this engine and everything that is going on with it, but I hope at some point they really focus on polishing bugs and issues before adding more features. The idea of a movie maker is really cool, but aren't there already tools for creating game trailers etc? I don't know why this would be at the top of the list.

One no brainer is to allow importing of resources, specifically sound files during run time. One use case example would be a music or beat game or in game custom music folder to load and play music at run time. Or a custom level editor where you can pick the music per level or import custom music. The point is, this has been an issue for a long time and a few google searches will show multiple open/closed issues and forum postings on it.

This is just an example of many requests that in my opinion make a lot of sense. A movie maker was honestly something that I would never have guessed if someone asked me to write a top 10 list of features needed.

I don’t understand why this wouldn’t be possible. It looks like Godot has a File API:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_file.html

The next step is passing the data to something that will process it which would be built into your game.
Purple Library Guy Nov 16, 2022
Quoting: twinsonianThe github page shows over 5k open issues. I love this engine and everything that is going on with it, but I hope at some point they really focus on polishing bugs and issues before adding more features.
I don't exactly disagree with this, but it seems odd if it's intended as a criticism of this that's happening right now. That's not the place they're in, in the software release cycle. Right now, they're building up to a shiny new major release with masses of features. Once they get 4.0 out, presumably there will be plenty of time for bugfix releases.
JordanPlayz158 Nov 16, 2022
Quoting: twinsonianThe github page shows over 5k open issues. I love this engine and everything that is going on with it, but I hope at some point they really focus on polishing bugs and issues before adding more features. The idea of a movie maker is really cool, but aren't there already tools for creating game trailers etc? I don't know why this would be at the top of the list.
I suppose the community dictated they'd rather have a movie maker than focus on fixing existing bugs but the good news is, if you think the bugs are important to fix, anyone can contribute to help tackle those issues alongside new features.
Kimyrielle Nov 16, 2022
Quoting: twinsonianThe github page shows over 5k open issues. I love this engine and everything that is going on with it, but I hope at some point they really focus on polishing bugs and issues before adding more features. The idea of a movie maker is really cool, but aren't there already tools for creating game trailers etc? I don't know why this would be at the top of the list.

That's a valid point. My first thought about the MM feature, however, was "Cool, now I can make a tutorial video without having to look for 3rd party tools".

QuoteOne no brainer is to allow importing of resources, specifically sound files during run time. One use case example would be a music or beat game or in game custom music folder to load and play music at run time. Or a custom level editor where you can pick the music per level or import custom music. The point is, this has been an issue for a long time and a few google searches will show multiple open/closed issues and forum postings on it.

They probably closed it because you can easily do it already? The following snippet loads a MP3 or OGG track from anywhere in the file-system and plays it.

func load_music_track(var path):
 var snd_file = File.new()
 snd_file.open(path, File.READ)
 if path.ends_with("ogg"):
  var stream = AudioStreamOGGVorbis.new()
  stream.data = snd_file.get_buffer(snd_file.get_len())
  $Music.stream = stream
 if path.ends_with("mp3"):
  var stream = AudioStreamMP3.new()
  stream.data = snd_file.get_buffer(snd_file.get_len())
  $Music.stream = stream
 snd_file.close()
 $Music.play()


My code is assuming there is a AudioStreamPlayer node called "Music" present. Change appropriatly if that's not the case.


Last edited by Kimyrielle on 16 November 2022 at 6:42 pm UTC
twinsonian Nov 17, 2022
@Kimyrielle

Thank you for this. I stand corrected on this point.
fenglengshun Nov 17, 2022
Quoting: twinsonianThe github page shows over 5k open issues.
Is that really THAT bad? Proton has around ~3.5k open issues. Godot, which I'd imagine is more complicated and has to deal with multiple platform, has ~5k, which isn't even broken down between feature request, small issues, critical issues, duplicate issues, and a few people just asking support.

I don't think Github issues tells a story about a project's bugginess, other than that a project has enough eyes and contributors to have ~5k issue. In which case, yeah, Godot is a big project now, it has a lot of eyes, and a lot of people participating in the project's development.


Last edited by fenglengshun on 17 November 2022 at 9:04 am UTC
const Nov 17, 2022
Quoting: itscalledreality
Quoting: twinsonianThe github page shows over 5k open issues. I love this engine and everything that is going on with it, but I hope at some point they really focus on polishing bugs and issues before adding more features. The idea of a movie maker is really cool, but aren't there already tools for creating game trailers etc? I don't know why this would be at the top of the list.

One no brainer is to allow importing of resources, specifically sound files during run time. One use case example would be a music or beat game or in game custom music folder to load and play music at run time. Or a custom level editor where you can pick the music per level or import custom music. The point is, this has been an issue for a long time and a few google searches will show multiple open/closed issues and forum postings on it.

This is just an example of many requests that in my opinion make a lot of sense. A movie maker was honestly something that I would never have guessed if someone asked me to write a top 10 list of features needed.

I don’t understand why this wouldn’t be possible. It looks like Godot has a File API:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_file.html

The next step is passing the data to something that will process it which would be built into your game.

I can actually confirm it, at least for Godot 3, I had build a rhythm game that could import music files in runtime, ran some nifty folded fourier transformations over it for motive recognition and created levels based on the results. Was basically a reimplementation of something I had done with Unity a few years earlier and I remember it was way easier with godot then with Unity ONCE YOU KNEW WHAT YOU DID. That's always the tricky part with godot. There are wonderful tutorials, the API documentation on function level is top notch, but once you leave certain paths or want to do things in code rather then declarative, damn you are on your own.
Wonder where I've left my project files for this ^^


Last edited by const on 17 November 2022 at 11:27 am UTC
ssj17vegeta Nov 19, 2022
That's an interesting feature for including cinematics in your game. Godot needs to keep its momentum, and features like that could bring more people, more attention, and perhaps more help to it.

I've been quite content with Godot 3's stability so far but sure, getting those issues down should be a priority... once Godot 4 is out.

A bunch of issues will also probably be resolved by either design changes in Godot 4, or simply the fact that some of those issues are explicitly targeted at obsolete versions. Anyway, I'm very happy for Godot, it's been a pleasure coding on it so far. If only I had more motivation to finish my projects :D
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