
Preparing for GDC 2018
Me and other Godot devs will be present at GDC 2018. The plan is to push Godot more into the corporate world.
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.
Our GodotCon 2018 is approaching and will take place at Ludus Académie in Brussels on February 5 & 6. It's your last chance to register if you want to attend the event, and it's now also the time for all participants to think about talks, workshops or other activities that they would like to have during GodotCon, and then send us their proposals.
So far we have been a few months on Patreon and the net result has been overwhelmingly positive, as we get enough funds each month to hire our lead developer and an intern! Still, it's time to start thinking about our next hire to continue speeding up Godot's development as well as its visibility and relevance in the gamedev industry.
GDNative changed a lot since it was first introduced. From being a scripting-centered module it quickly became a more general purpose tool than we initially assumed. Here we present the way GDNative and related technologies work together.
After three weeks of testing of the 3.0 beta 1 snapshot, we're now ready for a new beta release fixing many of the reported issues and then some! It also includes a surprise lightmapper from Juan, and many usability enhancements provided by our numerous contributors. The final 3.0 release is now very close, so stay tuned for more news and the release candidate!
A considerable number of users requested a more efficient way to have GI (Global Illumination) in their projects. Godot 3.0 currenty offers the GIProbe node, which provides a real-time approximation to GI. This generally works and looks pretty, but it's quite shader intensive, which makes it not work on mobile or low end GPUs. The newly added VR support also suffers with GIProbe, as it has to render in very high resolutions.
In February 2018, the Godot Engine community invites you to meet together at the FOSDEM (3 & 4 Feb) and the GodotCon (5 & 6 Feb), both in Brussels, Belgium and with dozens of Godot users and contributors, including our lead developer Juan Linietsky coming all the way from Buenos Aires. FOSDEM is a huge free and open source software-focused event with over 8000 attendees. Coming right after FOSDEM in the same city, GodotCon is a small but Godot-focused event with talks, workshops and many activities around our favourite engine.
Maybe you have already seen an AdPod around. They are three-sided giant multitouch capable screens. The company behind them customizes them for very important customers for promotion campaings for things like movies (Disney, Universal). They "skin" the device cosmetically for the targeted product and develop interactive apps that run on them. People walking by can interact with them, something which creates great product awareness and also entertains. Now they have decided to use Godot for such development work! The switch from the well-known non-free engine they were using formerly has been a wise decision.
Both testers and developers are doing a great job, but we need to go ever faster to get Godot 3.0 out as soon as possible - especially now that the master branch is in feature freeze, meaning that new features will have to wait for Godot 3.1 to be merged. We propose to have a special bug hunting day on Saturday, 9 December, to focus on fixing the bugs reported for the 3.0 milestone. Testers are also encouraged to use this opportunity to file new bug reports, after checking existing issues for potential duplicates.
We are all working hard on fixing the remaining issues for delivering a stable Godot 3.0 as soon as possible, but we definitely need a hand to speed up the work!
We met with Julian and Gilles at the Capitole du Libre 2017 in Toulouse. It's one of the largest French events dedicated to Free Software. We went there to showcase Godot 3 and try to introduce new users to it. Here's our report, with a bonus presentation.
Godot keeps growing steadily in both users and contributors, and 3.0 will be our best release yet. As our community keeps expanding, the development process also reshapes to accommodate new contributions. While our process is completely transparent, it is not obvious for a large part of the community how new features, fixes and improvements are added. This short article will attempt to shed some light on it.
Godot 3.0's development official entered the beta stage last week, which coincides for us with what we name the feature freeze: from now on, no new features will be merged in the master branch, as the focus will be fully on fixing existing issues to stabilize the current feature set. To get broader testing of the feature-frozen branch, we're releasing an official build, Godot 3.0 beta 1, just one month after the previous alpha 2.
Right on time before Beta Freeze, our superstar contributor Pedro Estebanez completed Onion Skinning support! This implementation is really good, and allows visualizing future and past frames. This helps animators have a much greater deal of control on repositioning objects on every frame.
Godot just got its first platinum sponsor, and we're thrilled to announce that it's Enjin Coin, a smart cryptocurrency designed for virtual goods in games! They are working on a module to integrate their open source framework in Godot 3.
Our campaign for the initial Patreon goal (hiring Juan full time) has been a huge success thanks to our community's support. Thanks to this, Juan is able to spend a lot more time working on Godot and helping other contributors. However, many areas remain where more dedicated developer time would be highly beneficial to advance the project faster.
As we are nearing the 3.0 release, it's the right time to contribute to the localisation effort and make sure that your native language has an accurate and complete translation of the Godot editor upon release.
We will be at the Capitole du Libre this week-end with Julian Murgia and Gilles Roudière. It's one of the largest French events dedicated to Free Software, and it's taking place in Toulouse. Come meet us if you're in the area!