Coming over 5 years after the release of Godot 3, the long wait for Godot 4 has finally come to an end, Godot 4 was just released. Godot is a popular open source 2D/3D game engine. The 4.0 release predictably enough is absolutely packed with new features and changes.
Key Features of the Godot 4 release include:
- Brand new renderers, including Vulkan, Direct3D 12 and a new OpenGL legacy renderer
- Several new 3D graphical features, including:
- SDFGI – Signed Distance Field Global Illumination
- Voxel Based Global Illumination
- Volumetric fog and new placeable fog volumes
- Manual and automatic occlusion culling
- AMD Fidelity FX Super Resolution (FSR) 1.0 support with 2.1 in the future
- SSIL – Screen Space Indirect Lighting
- Sky Shaders
- Decals support (project materials onto surfaces)
- Improved GPU particle support including attractors, collision, trails, sub-emitters and manual emission
- Improvements to 2D tooling, including:
- Improved level editing and tilemap tools
- New 2D rendering options including Clip Children and MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing)
- Improved lighting and shadows
- Improvements to the shader editor and shader language, including support for Compute Shaders
- Several improvements to GDScript
- Several improvements to C# support, including a move from Mono to .NET
- GDExtensions, new plugin-in/add-on system replacing GD Native, making it easier to extend Godot, such as adding additional programming language support
- Physics engine has reverted from Bullet physics to in-house custom physics solution
- Several UI improvements including multi-window support, improved theming support (and theme editor) and more
- A new text rendering solution including support for right-to-left languages as well as new internationalization tools
- Improved importer support, including a new binary FBX importer, runtime glTF support, automatic LOD generation and more
- New AI/Navigation tools including NavigationServer and Navigation Link support
- XR improvements including more AR/VR platforms supported
- Networking improvements and simplified multiplayer development experience and mesh/peer-to-peer networking support
- Audio system improvements
- Animation improvements including an enhanced animation editor, retargeting, animation libraries and more
- Several hundred more fixes, improvements and changes
Key Links
Synty Humble Bundle Used in Demo Video
You can learn more about the Godot 4 Release and see several of the new features in action in the video below.