Only two buttons, but dozens of games!
Godot's Dec 2016 - Jan 2017 Community Game Jam ended with 41 entries, including some very interesting games! Check the jam winners in this post: Astrid - The Meow Night Shadow, 2 and 3, Two Taps Racer!
Godot's Dec 2016 - Jan 2017 Community Game Jam ended with 41 entries, including some very interesting games! Check the jam winners in this post: Astrid - The Meow Night Shadow, 2 and 3, Two Taps Racer!
Most of the internal code in Godot was written over a decade ago, and many design decisions that were taken back then, did not stand the test of time. January was spent mostly updating Godot internals and breaking compatibility, now that we have the chance.
Here comes a new maintenance release in the current stable branch, Godot 2.1.2. It features various bug fixes and usability improvements, as well as brand new IPv6 support in the networking API, a better audio driver initialization reducing the latency, ternary operators in GDScript and out of the box split screen mode for 2D!
The Godot Engine community is officially attending the FOSDEM 2017 in Brussels, Belgium on Feb 4-5, and also organises its own "GodotCon" event in Brussels the next two days (Feb 6-7). All interested Godot users and contributors are invited to join us for a great real life meeting!
Starting now, and only for the upcoming 3.0 release, HEAD will break compatibility completely. Projects from Godot 1.x and 2.x **will not work** and this is expected.
It's been a month since the second progress report, and progress continues towards the new Godot renderer. This milestone was (and will likely be) the most difficult, due to the techniques that had to be implemented.
After the success of the previous game jams in March and June, we launch a new community game jam for the new year, with the theme "Two buttons". Go to https://itch.io/jam/godotjam122016 to partake in the jam, alone or in a team with other community members!
It's been a month since the first [progress report](https://godotengine.org/article/godots-new-renderer-progress-report-1), and progress continues towards the new Godot renderer. Little by little every system falls into place, and rendering starts feeling a lot more mature.
Three months after the release of Godot 2.1, we finally have the first maintenance release in the current stable branch. Rich of 271 new commits, it brings many bug fixes, enhancements and even some new features backported for the master branch! Highlights are OSX gamepad support, AStar implementation and some advanced drag and drop features in the editor!
We decided to skip the planned 2.2 release to work at full steam on the upcoming Godot 3.0 and its new OpenGL ES 3.0 / OpenGL 3.3 renderer. We aim for a Godot 3.0 release in the first quarter of 2017, and it should bring an incredible load of features and improvements. Juan Linietsky will also be working full-time on Godot for the coming months thanks to the Mozilla MOSS award that we received earlier this year.
As many of you have probably heard, a new rendering backend is being worked on for Godot. One of the most common comments when evaluating godot by potential users is that, for 2D, Godot is awesome but for 3D it's pretty far from the mainstream alternatives. For Godot 3.0 (our new release being worked on) we are working hard to change this.
After several months of development, the web frontend to Godot's Asset Library finally reached the beta status!
For most game developers, shaders are this scary monster that presents itself with such a complexity that seems out of reach. In reality, shaders are quite simple by default and just get more complex the more you add to them.
The long-awaited framework to create point & click adventure games, initially promised during the Kickstarter for The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy®, is finally available. It is of course open source, and comes with a great manual written by Ariel Manzur and the FLOSS Manuals FR team.
Hacktoberfest, an event that encourages you to contribute to open source projects (Godot included) starts now, and will last for the whole month of October. If you make at least four pull requests, you can earn a cool hacker T-shirt!
If you ever lurked in Godot source code, and tried to follow the flow of the logic, you most likely noticed that most code related to scene, formats, etc. always ends up in a giant "server" class. These really large classes, which Godot calls "severs", generally abstract some implementation or architecture.
Godot has many built-in types. Built-in types are used for non-pointer API arguments, where you need to pass around information fast and you don't really care much about keeping a reference. One of the early built-in types in Godot is Image, which is like a Vector, but with a little more information related to image data (such as width, height, format and whether or not it has mipmaps).
Up to now, Godot networking was only limited to UDP, TCP and some high level protocols such as SSL and HTTP. However, for games themselves, the key is how to synchronize state between games. Having to do this manually with low level APIs can be an enormous pain, due to the inherent limitations of the protocols...
There is a common misundertanding in the industry about us, Godot devs, trying to reinvent the wheel because we like it. This could not be further away from the truth.
After almost six months of hard work, we are proudly presenting you the marvellous Godot Engine 2.1. Just like 2.0, this version focuses almost exclusively on further improving usability and the editor interface.
The 2.1-stable release is imminent, so to make sure everything will work as expected, here's a new release candidate with its load of bugfixing and small enhancements.
Our first Release Candidate for Godot 2.1 is here! If you don't find enough bugs, this will be our final candidate, so better get testing!
The class reference has seen a lot of work over the last 3 months, and could still use more hands to help document all the classes, methods, constants, member variables and signals for the complete Godot API! With a handful of contributors it's a huge job, but with the help of the community we can make it pretty fast!
After 5 months of development and more than 1,600 commits, we are pretty happy with the state of the upcoming 2.1 version, and therefore release a beta for the community to test and give feedback upon! This new releases had again an important focus on usability, making Godot a very convenient and pleasing engine to use!