* 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.
* 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
-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.
Various fixes to UV2 unwrapping and the GPU lightmapper. Listed here for
context in case of git blame/bisect:
* Fix UV2 unwrapping on import, also cleaned up the unwrap cache code.
* Fix saving of RGBA images in EXR format.
* Fixes to the GPU lightmapper:
- Added padding between atlas elements, avoids bleeding.
- Remove old SDF generation code.
- Fix baked attenuation for Omni/Spot lights.
- Fix baking of material properties onto UV2 (wireframe was
wrongly used before).
- Disable statically baked lights for objects that have a
lightmap texture to avoid applying the same light twice.
- Fix lightmap pairing in RendererSceneCull.
- Fix UV2 array generated from `RenderingServer::mesh_surface_get_arrays()`.
- Port autoexposure fix for OIDN from 3.x.
- Save debug textures as EXR when using floating point format.
-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.
Added an occlusion culling system with support for static occluder meshes.
It can be enabled via `Project Settings > Rendering > Occlusion Culling > Use Occlusion Culling`.
Occluders are defined via the new `Occluder3D` resource and instanced using the new
`OccluderInstance3D` node. The occluders can also be automatically baked from a
scene using the built-in editor plugin.
* 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).
Inverted the spotlight angle attenuation so a higher value results in
a dimmer light, this makes it more consistent with the distance
attenuation.
Also changed the way spotlighs are computed in SDFGI
and GIPorbes and GPU lightmapper, now it matches the falloff used in the scene rendering
code.
-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.
-All shadow rendering is done with raster now (no compute)
-All shadow rendering is done by rendering directly to the shadow atlas
-Improved how buffer clearing is done to optimize the above.
-Ability to set shadows as 16 bits.
-SDFGI direct light is done over many frames
-SDFGI Changed settings for rays/frame
-SDFGI Misc optimizations
-SDFGI Bug fix on probe scroll
-GIProbe was not working, got it to work again
-GIProbe dynamic objects were not working, fixed
-Added a half size GI option.
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 🎆
