
Godot in Google Summer of Code 2018
Godot has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code program in 2018. This summer we will have 5 students working on new features to the engine.
Godot has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code program in 2018. This summer we will have 5 students working on new features to the engine.
For the past months, popular demand has been growing for a way to propery map controller axes in Godot. For a long time Godot was only able to map a single event to an action, making it impossible to deal with analog strengths. Today (after months of discussions), this problem has been solved, and it only took very little amount of changes to the current input mapping system!
Godot has been around for over 4 years, and localized documentation in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, Russian and many other languages has always been a very requested feature. After a lot of documentation work to ensure that we have a good original English content to translate from, and some more work on setting up a convenient infrastructure for translating and keeping translations up to date, we are now ready to welcome contributions!
Latest update on the GLES2 and GDNative developments. This month, a lot of time has been spend on refactoring the way materials work together with shaders, but also the C++ bindings got some nice new make-up!
As we just reached our third goal on Patreon, we are now able to hire Rémi Verschelde (Akien) as full-time project manager and representative! In this article, he gives some insights on what brought him to Godot, how he helped organize the teamwork and became the de facto project manager, as well as plans for the future.
I went to GDC yet again (this time GDC 2018) trying to see how Godot is doing at the game industry. To my surprise this time, it was quite different..
Feedback has been quite good on the past two beta builds for the upcoming Godot 2.1.5 (providing legacy support for users of Godot 2), so we're now publishing a release candidate. If all goes well (no new regression reported), that should more or less be the 2.1.5 final release. So make sure to test it thoroughly!
Another month, another progress report! This time with the early beginnings of 3D rendering in GLES2 and some GDNative ecosystem updates.
Sketchfab is a well-known site where you can browse a big library of 3D models and download them for use in your own projects. Many of them are free, covered by open licenses. They have just announced their download API, which allows third-parties to integrate with it, giving any application access to hundreds of thousands of models in glTF, a standard format that many tools, Godot included, understand. They have integrations for other famous game engines, like Unity and Unreal and have decided to provide an official plugin for Godot!
One step closer to releasing 2.1.5 (our "old stable" branch) with this new beta 2 build! If you are still working with Godot 2.1 for any reason, make sure to give it a try and ensure that your projects still work as intended. If all goes well we will soon make a release candidate build and then the stable one.
Will you be attending GDC? If so, please come visit us at our 2018 meetup that we organize together with GitHub.
We've found several small regressions in Godot 3.0.1. This maintenance release addresses these and also add some features for our C# users.
The rationale for the OpenGL ES 3 renderer was having a single codebase for targeting all platforms. This sounds really good in theory and we could say it *almost* works, but...
We are pretty happy with the overall stability of Godot 3.0, that we released in late January. Still, we want to provide the best level of support to our users, so we are going to make regular maintenance releases for the 3.0 branch, to bring backward-compatible bug fixes and enhancements to all users. Our aim is that you should be able to just upgrade to 3.0.1 and continue developing your 3.0 projects without any change (apart from C# support, which is still in alpha and thus a moving target). Check the detailed release notes to see what's new in Godot 3.0.1, and what bugs have been fixed.
We've released the release candidate for the first patch release of the Godot 3.0 branch. This is what is going to be 3.0.1. We've added many fixes and some enhancements to make your lives as Godot users (even) better. Please see the article for details on the release and we'd like to ask all our users to test!
Godot VR support is slowly improving. The OpenVR drivers are now supplied through the asset library and we have the first version of our Oculus drivers available!
As Godot 3.0 is a major release with compatibility breakage, we are still going to support the previous 2.1 stable branch for some time. Many fixes and enhancements have been done in the 2.1 branch since the release of 2.1.4 in August 2017, so it's time to get them tested widely to go towards a 2.1.5 release.
Me and other Godot devs will be present at GDC 2018. The plan is to push Godot more into the corporate world.
Because of the big release there have been many GDNative related tasks that needed to be addressed. Apart from that, the month was mostly spent on implementing more 2D items in the renderer as well as working on getting custom shaders running.
After more than 18 months of development, all Godot Engine contributors are proud to present our biggest release so far, Godot 3.0! It brings a brand new rendering engine with state-of-the-art PBR workflow for 3D, an improved assets pipeline, GDNative to load native code as plugins, C# 7.0 support, and many other features!
Yet another iteration in the last week before 3.0 stable - this third release candidate should fix the main issues found in 3.0 RC 2, and bring us very close to what the stable release should be. Please test it extensively, it's (probably) the last call before takeoff!
Thanks to our very supporting patrons I have the opportunity to work part-time on Godot! My work will be mostly about implementing an OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible rendering backend for Godot 3.1, as well as maintaining the GDNative system and bindings. The first month I spent on getting started and familiar with the rendering in Godot.
The long-awaited release is finally here, Godot 3.0... RC 2 ;) The actual stable release is still planned for January 2018, but we have various recent bug fixes that need broader testing before we can label the current master branch "stable" and move on towards the next milestone. You can already expect a third (and hopefully last) RC early next week, and the stable release shortly after.
Things have sped up a lot in the Godot development team since the beginning of 2018, to be able to finalize 3.0 and release it in January. The release freeze has been announced, meaning that enhancements and non-critical bug fixes are no longer being merged, to ensure that the master branch can stabilize and eventually be ready for the final release. This means of course that many known issues won't be fixed for 3.0, but will have to wait for 3.1 or for the maintenance 3.0.x releases which should start arriving in February.