Godot, the open source game engine is updated to version 3.3

After 7 months of development, Godot 3 free game engine launched.3 which is suitable for creating 2D and 3D games. The Godot Branch 3.3 is fully compatible with Godot 3.2 and continues to develop stable versions of the engine, for which a long support cycle will be provided.

Initially, instead of Godot 3.3, it was planned to release the update 3.2.4, but the 3.2.x versions were perceived by users as corrective, despite porting new features from the 4.0 branch, so the project switched to the version scheme classical semantic.

En particular, updating the third digit will now indicate the presence of only fixes, the second, the inclusion of new functionality and the first, the presence of changes that affect compatibility. The 3.xx branch will be followed in parallel with 4.xx until Godot 4.x is fully stabilized and adapted to all current hardware.

Main new features of Godot 3.3

In this new version, as the main novelty, it stands out that it has prepared a editor version that works in a web browser.

Also added the ability to export games for the Android platform in AAB format (Android App Bundle), plus APK packages. The AAB format allows loading only those native libraries that are needed to work on the current device (for example, armeabi-v7a or arm64-v8a).

For Android, the ability to embed elements based on the Godot engine in the form of sub-components that use a part of the window is also implemented in the applications, in addition to the addition of support for blind areas of the screen (rounds and notches for the camera), mouse events, and input from an external keyboard.

A new API has been proposed to create and distribute plugins for iOS, which allows you to move plugins (ARKit, GameCenter, InAppStore) to a separate repository and develop them independently of the Godot engine. This API was previously implemented for the Android platform.

Another important change was in the web game exporters (HTML5) that were improved as improvements and support for keyboards and gamepads were received, in addition to also received support for GDNative and multithreaded scripts for games running in the browser, but due to the limitations of the HTML5 platform, its implementation is incompatible with the options for native games. Also, the streaming implementation is tied to the SharedArrayBuffer API, which is not available in all browsers. The multithreaded profiles also adds support for the AudioWorklet API, what allows for better audio output without blocking the main stream.

On the other hand, we can find that added support for creating games for Apple's new hardware equipped with the chip M1 ARMS, along with which support was added for attaching digital signatures to executable files generated for macOS.

Since branch 4.0 a modernized API to organize multithreading has been carried over, in which the capabilities of the C ++ 14 standard are used, the reliability of work on different platforms has been increased, and performance optimization has been carried out.

An optimization of branch 4.0 has been moved which uses BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) structure instead of Octree method for dynamic spatial separation during rendering. BVH is now the default and resolves many performance issues.

A unified implementation of 2D batch processing (batch processing, optimization to reduce pull calls taking into account the relative position of objects) is used, which can be used for both OpenGL ES 3 and OpenGL ES 2. The optimization itself now covers more objects, including lines and polygons.

Added a new lighting map builder (lightmapper), which applies the trace path method and supports noise reduction using the oidn (Open Image Denoise) library. The new lightmapper uses CPUs for computing and solves most of the quality problems inherent in the old controller.

The OpenXR plugin was added with support for the standard of the same name to create virtual and augmented reality applications. The HTML5 port for creating games based on virtual reality technologies has added support for the WebXR specification.

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.


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