* Keep track of when projector, softshadow or directional sofshadow were enabled.
* Enable them via specializaton constant where it makes sense.
* Re-implements soft shadows.
* Re-implements light projectors.
* IF a texture was reimported (calling replace as an example), it would invalidate all materials using it, causing plenty of errors.
* Added the possibility to get a notification when a uniform set is erased.
* With this notification, materials can be queued for update properly.
* Fixed and redone the process to obtain render information from a viewport
* Some stats, such as material changes are too difficult to guess on Vulkan, were removed.
* Separated visible and shadow stats, which causes confusion.
* Texture, buffer and general video memory can be queried now.
* Fixed the performance metrics too.
The Optimized shadow depth range was removed in late 2020 in favor
of the Stable shadow depth range, but it still had a (broken) property
that allowed to enable it.
* Colors were imported as 16BPP (half float)
* Far most common use cases only require 8BPP
* If you need higher data precision, use a custom array, which are supported now.
**WARNING**: 3D Scenes imported in 4.0 no longer compatible with this new format. You need to re-import them (erase them from .godot/import)
* Removed entirely from RenderingServer.
* Replaced by ImmediateMesh resource.
* ImmediateMesh replaces ImmediateGeometry, but could use more optimization in the future.
* Sprite3D and AnimatedSprite3D work again, ported from Godot 3.x (though a lot of work was needed to adapt them to Godot 4).
* RootMotionView works again.
* Polygon3D editor works again.
* Ability to allocate empty objects in RID_Owner, so RID_PtrOwner is not needed in most cases.
* Improves cache usage, as objects are now allocated together
* Should improve performance in 2D rendering
* This is the 3D counterpart to #49632
* Implemented a bit different as 3D works using instancing
After merged, both 2D and 3D classes will most likely be renamed in a separate PR to DisplayNotifier2D/3D.
* GIProbe is now VoxelGI
* BakedLightmap is now LightmapGI
As godot adds more ways to provide GI (as an example, SDFGI in 4.0), the different techniques (which have different pros/cons) need to be properly named to avoid confusion.
-Mesh2D now works
-MultiMesh2D now works
-Polygon2D now works
-Added hooks for processing 2D particles
-Skeleton2D now works
2D particles still not working, but stuff needed for it is now implemented.
-Enable the trails and set the length in seconds
-Provide a mesh with a skeleton and a skin
-Or, alternatively use one of the built-in TubeTrailMesh/RibbonTrailMesh
-Works deterministically
-Fixed particle collisions (were broken)
-Not working in 2D yet (that will happen next)
We've been using standard C library functions `memcpy`/`memset` for these since
2016 with 67f65f6639.
There was still the possibility for third-party platform ports to override the
definitions with a custom header, but this doesn't seem useful anymore.
* 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().
-Advanced Settings toggle also hides advanced properties when disabled
-Simplified Advanced Bar (errors were just plain redundant)
-Reorganized rendering quality settings.
-Reorganized miscelaneous settings for clean up.
-Rendering server now uses a split RID allocate/initialize internally, this allows generating RIDs immediately but initialization to happen later on the proper thread (as rendering APIs generally requiere to call on the right thread).
-RenderingServerWrapMT is no more, multithreading is done in RenderingServerDefault.
-Some functions like texture or mesh creation, when renderer supports it, can register and return immediately (so no waiting for server API to flush, and saving staging and command buffer memory).
-3D physics server changed to be made multithread friendly.
-Added PhysicsServer3DWrapMT to use 3D physics server from multiple threads.
-Disablet Bullet (too much effort to make multithread friendly, this needs to be fixed eventually).
-Always use temporal reproject, it just loos way better than any other filter.
-By always using termporal reproject, the shadowmap reduction can be done away with, massively improving performance.
-Disadvantage of temporal reproject is update latency so..
-Made sure a gaussian filter runs in XY after fog, this allows to keep stability and lower latency.
-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
-Removed sync to draw, now everything syncs to draw by default.
-Fixed many validation layer errors.
-Added support for VkImageViewUsageCreateInfo to fix validation layer warnings.
-Texture, buffer, raster and compute functions now all allow spcifying which barriers will be used.
-When importing, a vertex-only version of the mesh is created.
-This version is used when rendering shadows, and improves performance by reducing bandwidth
-It's automatic, but can optionally be used by users, in case they want to make special versions of geometry for shadow casting.
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 🎆
