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 🎆
Since we clone the environments to build thirdparty code, we don't get an
explicit dependency on the build objects produced by that environment.
So when we update thirdparty code, Godot code using it is not necessarily
rebuilt (I think it is for changed headers, but not for changed .c/.cpp files),
which can lead to an invalid compilation output (linking old Godot .o files
with a newer, potentially ABI breaking version of thirdparty code).
This was only seen as really problematic with bullet updates (leading to
crashes when rebuilding Godot after a bullet update without cleaning .o files),
but it's safer to fix it everywhere, even if it's a LOT of hacky boilerplate.
-Reworked how meshes are treated by importer by using EditorSceneImporterMesh and EditorSceneImporterMeshNode. Instead of Mesh and MeshInstance, this allows more efficient processing of meshes before they are actually registered in the RenderingServer.
-Integrated MeshOptimizer
-Reworked internals of SurfaceTool to use arrays, making it more performant and easy to run optimizatons on.
