The Godot team are preparing the next release of their free and open source game engine, with Godot 4.2 beta 1 now available for anyone to jump in and test it. This is part of their newer release cycle, to bring point releases more often.
Some of what's new includes (highlights):
- Lots of UI improvements to the Project Manager and the Godot Editor.
- Implemented optional forced integer scaling. Integer scaling ensures that no matter the aspect ratio you get a square pixel grid without distortions for 2D game development.
- Big improvements to Tilemap support.
- No more needing to restart the editor when you change the resource import type. This along with a new powerful import pipeline with advanced options.
- A fix with Steam Input for some gamepad events running twice.
- Big improvements to Android support.
- iOS one-click deploy support.
- Various rendering performance improvements
- AMD FSR 2.2 support added.
- A new lightmapper denoising approach.
- For Forward+ and Mobile rendering methods this release introduces 2D HDR rendering, unlocking 3D effects, such as glow, for 2D games.
- An optional ANGLE-backed OpenGL rendering driver was added for macOS and Windows.
- Lots of improvements for the Particles system to give VFX artists more control. It's now possible to directly animate velocity over lifetime, inherit projectile velocity, and change the emission amount of particles.
- Shaders: an addition of drop-down list properties to custom nodes and output ports for vector types are now expandable by default.
- Scripting: the script debugger now comes with full support for threaded code (GH-76582 by Juan Linietsky), including the execution stack and breakpoints.
- Improved XR support with foveated rendering support, ported from Godot 3.x (GH-80881), and access to raw hand-tracking data.
- Experimental support for Android (.NET 7.0+ required) and iOS (.NET 8.0 required) export targets
See the announcement for more.
As for how they're doing after the recent Unity debacle that caused quite a surge in interest: Godot Engine currently has €51,024 in funding per month from their dedicated platform, plus their Patreon also shows £7,257 per month funding.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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9 comments
Congratulations as always to all Godot contributors and maintainers. I hope the increase in funds allow them to review and merge PRs faster. I've been following Godot on GitHub for close to a decade now, the explosion in contributions has been excellent for the engine, but I get the feeling they just don't have the resources to review and merge all the PRs that come in very timely (some PRs are in limbo for close to a year).
I still firmly believe Godot maintainers are doing their absolute best with the resources they have. Though if folks from Re-Logic and Robot Gentleman are also going to start contributing code directly to the engine along with their donations, I hope they can get more people on board to help with review and getting features merged faster. I believe this is starting to happen, with big features getting prioritized review (such as Android C# and FSR 2.2)
Though I'm not on the camp on the issue tracker that paints this as Godot being a scam (or even a cult ) or anything. I'm looking at this through a developer's lens and I can appreciate the challenge of getting features merged, so I hope as Godot continues to grow they can scale well with the increase in financial support.
Last edited by sonic2kk on 13 October 2023 at 2:30 pm UTC
I still firmly believe Godot maintainers are doing their absolute best with the resources they have. Though if folks from Re-Logic and Robot Gentleman are also going to start contributing code directly to the engine along with their donations, I hope they can get more people on board to help with review and getting features merged faster. I believe this is starting to happen, with big features getting prioritized review (such as Android C# and FSR 2.2)
Though I'm not on the camp on the issue tracker that paints this as Godot being a scam (or even a cult ) or anything. I'm looking at this through a developer's lens and I can appreciate the challenge of getting features merged, so I hope as Godot continues to grow they can scale well with the increase in financial support.
Last edited by sonic2kk on 13 October 2023 at 2:30 pm UTC
6 Likes, Who?
They broke $50K/month! Lovely. Lemme just grab the full graphic - it gives me a nice warm feeling every time I see it!
Last edited by scaine on 13 October 2023 at 6:20 pm UTC
Last edited by scaine on 13 October 2023 at 6:20 pm UTC
5 Likes, Who?
Quoting: sonic2kkCongratulations as always to all Godot contributors and maintainers. I hope the increase in funds allow them to review and merge PRs faster. I've been following Godot on GitHub for close to a decade now, the explosion in contributions has been excellent for the engine, but I get the feeling they just don't have the resources to review and merge all the PRs that come in very timely (some PRs are in limbo for close to a year).
I still firmly believe Godot maintainers are doing their absolute best with the resources they have. Though if folks from Re-Logic and Robot Gentleman are also going to start contributing code directly to the engine along with their donations, I hope they can get more people on board to help with review and getting features merged faster. I believe this is starting to happen, with big features getting prioritized review (such as Android C# and FSR 2.2)
Though I'm not on the camp on the issue tracker that paints this as Godot being a scam (or even a cult ) or anything. I'm looking at this through a developer's lens and I can appreciate the challenge of getting features merged, so I hope as Godot continues to grow they can scale well with the increase in financial support.
Only a single person merges these PR, so they need to assign a second person to the task.
2 Likes, Who?
> Only a single person merges these PR, so they need to assign a second person to the task.
While I absolutely agree with you that they need more people who can merge, two people at least can merge PRs: Yuri Sizov and Rémi Verschelde. Juan Linietsky likely can also merge PRs, as I believe Rémi and Juan were the main folks behind Godot originally. However I don't think others can, though there are other core reviewers (Hugo Locurcio, Clay John, KoBeWi, A Thousand Ships).
Substantially smaller projects (libGDX, Dolphin Emulator) have at least two people who can merge PRs. I suppose it's difficult as well, as even with all of these reviewers, triage is difficult, and PRs can slip through the cracks.
Not to mention, these team members also have to divide their time between the issue tracker, discussions, godot-proposals, and their own development efforts. I suppose perhaps if I could amend what I said, it is not only about merging, but also helping contributors via review to get their changes approved.
The more capacity Godot has to review & help those contributions into the engine in a quality and timely manner, the better.
While I absolutely agree with you that they need more people who can merge, two people at least can merge PRs: Yuri Sizov and Rémi Verschelde. Juan Linietsky likely can also merge PRs, as I believe Rémi and Juan were the main folks behind Godot originally. However I don't think others can, though there are other core reviewers (Hugo Locurcio, Clay John, KoBeWi, A Thousand Ships).
Substantially smaller projects (libGDX, Dolphin Emulator) have at least two people who can merge PRs. I suppose it's difficult as well, as even with all of these reviewers, triage is difficult, and PRs can slip through the cracks.
Not to mention, these team members also have to divide their time between the issue tracker, discussions, godot-proposals, and their own development efforts. I suppose perhaps if I could amend what I said, it is not only about merging, but also helping contributors via review to get their changes approved.
The more capacity Godot has to review & help those contributions into the engine in a quality and timely manner, the better.
2 Likes, Who?
Quoting: sonic2kkWhile I absolutely agree with you that they need more people who can merge, two people at least can merge PRs: Yuri Sizov and Rémi Verschelde. Juan Linietsky likely can also merge PRs, as I believe Rémi and Juan were the main folks behind Godot originally. However I don't think others can, though there are other core reviewers (Hugo Locurcio, Clay John, KoBeWi, A Thousand Ships).
Pressing the merge button isn't the most important part of the work. (In some projects like Rust, most merges are handled by a bot.)
The majority of the work is reviewing and testing a pull request, which takes a while for any nontrivial pull request (especially when you need a real world project to test it).
Reviewing PRs is something anyone can do, even if you're not an existing contributor. GitHub's features are designed around this – you don't have to be an organization member or a prior contributor to leave a review, although it will be displayed as "non-binding". These non-binding reviews are still valuable to us (as long as you don't just press Approve without writing a description :)).
We have a website that references pull requests that need a review: https://godotengine.github.io/godot-team-reports/
Many PRs are also in limbo not because of the implementation, but because we don't know how much the feature is needed. This is usually due to the PR lacking a proposal, or the proposal not seeing much activity. New features in particular need to have significant community demand before they can be merged.
Last edited by Calinou on 13 October 2023 at 11:04 pm UTC
3 Likes, Who?
Quoting: CalinouThe majority of the work is reviewing and testing a pull request
Indeed. As someone who reviews and pulls a lot of PRs (not for Godot, obviously), I have to say: there can never be enough peer review! Having to reject PRs multiple times (for seemingly obvious reasons) can be quite frustrating.
1 Likes, Who?
I just started playing around with Godot 4.1 and I'm impressed how easy it is. My previous experience was with using SDL and C, thanks to which I learned about game loop and basic physics, and that translated very straight into the Godot main loop. It seems to me very powerful and sometimes overwhelming, but thanks to the rich docs I'm learning a lot.
I suggest anyone with a minimum experience in programming to try it
I suggest anyone with a minimum experience in programming to try it
2 Likes, Who?
Nateman1000 Oct 15, 2023
This is such a big improvement. Unity is in disunity after all this
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