nine months later from the release of version 3.4 and while the developers are now mostly working on version 4.0, the launch of the new version of the free and cross-platform video game engine, Godot 3.5.
For those who are unfamiliar with this engine, they should know that It is suitable for creating 2D and 3D games. The engine supports easy language of learning to define the logic of the game, a graphical environment to design games, a one-click game deployment system, extensive physics simulation and animation capabilities, a built-in debugger, and a system for identifying performance bottlenecks.
The game engine code, game design environment, and related development tools (physics engine, sound server, 2D / 3D rendering backends, etc.) are distributed under license from MIT.
Main new features of Godot 3.5
In this new version of Godot 3.5 that is presented, it is highlighted that comes with a completely revised navigation system, in which the new navigation server for Godot 4.0 was implemented in 2020, which was later ported to the 3.x branch, thereby fixing many bugs and greatly improving the feature set.
Besides that, the new NavigationServer adds support for obstacle avoidance using the RVO2 library, while the backport was done while trying to preserve API compatibility within reason, but it is mentioned that the underlying behavior will change, mainly to provide much more features and flexibility.
Moreover, the migration of Godot Engine 3.5 to PS Vita means that game developers you now have the option to export your projects to a format suitable for installation on a Sony laptop, i.e. .vpk files, although it should be noted that there is also a list of technical limitations that developers will have to deal with when creating a Vita version of the game.
Another novelty presented by this new version of Godot 3.5 is that the long-awaited Label3D node is now provided ready to use to display text in 3D scenes. For more advanced use cases, TextMesh can be used to generate 3D meshes from font glyphs, so you can add WordArt to your scenes.
We can also find new flow containers, the two newly added flow containers HFlowContainer and VFlowContainer, arrange child control nodes vertically or horizontally in a left-to-right or top-to-bottom flow. A line is filled with control nodes until no more fit on the same line, similar to text in an auto-wrap tag or CSS Flexbox layout. The new container types are especially useful for dynamic content in different window sizes.
Asynchronous compilation of shaders + caching also stands out, since this new system arrives uses a "supershader" for each material (a large shader that supports all possible rendering conditions, slow but compiled at startup and optionally cached for future executions), while the smaller shader efficient and condition-specific compiles asynchronously.
This means that the first time a material is used under certain conditions, such as lighting types, shadows enabled or not, etc., the rendering may be slower for a second or two, but the slowdown will not be too bad. It is mentioned that on more powerful devices it may not even be noticeable.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Interpolation of 3D physical objects, allowing for better fluidity during physical engine and rendering engine tick changes.
- a new mechanism for accessing scene objects from code, based on unique names (usually paths)
- new stream wrappers for GUI
- a 3D form of occlusion, to optimize scenes
- Android support (for the publisher, games can be exported to Android for a long time)
- a material that can be applied to an object
- Hundreds of bug fixes.
Finally, if you want to know more about it, you can check the details In the following link.
Get Godot
Godot is available for download at this page for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. You can also find it at Steam y itch.io.