Since OpenGL will not be available in Godot 4.0, this exposes a
choice between Vulkan clustered and Vulkan mobile in the project manager.
Despite the name, Vulkan mobile has many benefits on desktop platforms.
It provides better performance on simple scenes, and ensures that you
won't accidentally use unsupported features while testing your project
on desktop platforms.
The Vulkan backend setting was made into a "basic" setting so that
it can be changed without having to enable the Advanced Settings toggle.
This also improves list formatting to use bullet points and tweaks
the property hint to be more descriptive.
* Shadow quality settings now specialization constant.
* Decal and light projector filters can be set.
* Changing those settings forces re-creation of the pipelines.
These changes should help improve performance related to shadow mapping, and allows improving performance by sacrificing decal and light projector quality.
* 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.
This commit adds the following properties to GeometryInstance3D: `visibility_range_begin`,
`visibility_range_begin_margin`, `visibility_range_end`, `visibility_range_end_margin`.
Together they define a range in which the GeometryInstance3D will be visible from the camera,
taking hysteresis into account for state changes. A begin or end value of 0 will be ignored,
so the visibility range can be open-ended in both directions.
This commit also adds the `visibility_parent` property to 'Node3D'.
Which defines the visibility parents of the node and its subtree (until
another parent is defined).
Visual instances with a visibility parent will only be visible when the parent, and all of its
ancestors recursively, are hidden because they are closer to the camera than their respective
`visibility_range_begin` thresholds.
Combining visibility ranges and visibility parents users can set-up a quick HLOD system
that shows high detail meshes when close (i.e buildings, trees) and merged low detail meshes
for far away groups (i.e. cities, woods).
* 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.
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.
-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.
-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 🎆
-Much greater pairing/unpairing performance
-For now, using it for culling too, but this will change in a couple of days.
-Added a paged allocator, to efficiently alloc/free some types of objects.
Aaron Franke
Hugo Locurcio
Rémi Verschelde
Rémi Verschelde
reduz
jfons
Bastiaan Olij
Morris Tabor
Stefan Boronczyk
clayjohn
K. S. Ernest (iFire) Lee
Tomasz Chabora