* Shader compilation is now cached. Subsequent loads take less than a millisecond.
* Improved game, editor and project manager startup time.
* Editor uses .godot/shader_cache to store shaders.
* Game uses user://shader_cache
* Project manager uses $config_dir/shader_cache
* Options to tweak shader caching in project settings.
* Editor path configuration moved from EditorSettings to new class, EditorPaths, so it can be available early on (before shaders are compiled).
* Reworked ShaderCompilerRD to ensure deterministic shader code creation (else shader may change and cache will be invalidated).
* Added shader compression with SMOLV: https://github.com/aras-p/smol-v
* Particle shaders now have start() and process()
* Particle collision happens between them.
* The RESTART property is kept, so porting an old shader is still possible.
This fixes the problem of particle collisions not functioning on the first particle frame.
-Used a more consistent set of keywords for the shader
-Remove all harcoded entry points
-Re-wrote the GLSL shader parser, new system is more flexible. Allows any entry point organization.
-Entry point for sky shaders is now sky().
-Entry point for particle shaders is now process().
-Added more finegrained control in RenderingDevice API
-Optimized barriers (use less ones for thee same)
-General optimizations
-Shadows render all together unbarriered
-GI can render together with shadows.
-SDFGI can render together with depth-preoass.
-General fixes
-Added GPU detection
Happy new year to the wonderful Godot community!
2020 has been a tough year for most of us personally, but a good year for
Godot development nonetheless with a huge amount of work done towards Godot
4.0 and great improvements backported to the long-lived 3.2 branch.
We've had close to 400 contributors to engine code this year, authoring near
7,000 commit! (And that's only for the `master` branch and for the engine code,
there's a lot more when counting docs, demos and other first-party repos.)
Here's to a great year 2021 for all Godot users 🎆
Rémi Verschelde
reduz