Linux / Open Source

Godot Game Engine- Road to Version 4.0, Story So far

Godot Engine which is an open source game engine, is heading towards version 4.0 and the biggest change that it would bring is adding Vulkan Support.

We have already reported that the Vulkan Branch has almost reached with feature parity with OpenGL and is merged as the master branch. Juan Linietsky, the lead developer has now posted additional features in a new blog post and series of tweets. so let’s dig in.

A new Post-Process Stack

The post-process stack was rewritten and modernized.

Rewritten Auto-Exposure

Auto-exposure was rewritten and now uses GPU compute (Vulkan based) for parallel execution. This results in faster and more accurate luminance determination from the scene.

autoexp.png

New Glow / Bloom Effect

The glow and bloom code was rewritten and adds new Mix mode.

glow_mix.jpeg

New Depth of Field

There is a new depth of field (DOF) effect which is considerably faster and better looking than the existing solution. By default, it uses an approximated hexagonal Bokeh shape, with an optional (but more expensive) circular one for higher end devices.

New Screen Space AO

The screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) is now readded and uses Compute. It also supports rendering to half resolution. When this is enabled, the occlusion is upscaled using a smart filter that preserves edges, so the quality loss is much less noticeable.

ssao.png

Specular Anti-Aliasing

This is achieved with a smart hack where it is now possible to associate a roughness texture with a normal texture, which will adjust roughness based on normal mipmap variance. Godot auto-detects the use of both textures in a shader and it automatically fixes the roughness texture (although it can be done manually too).

Source

Abhishek

Abhishek

Abhishek is a Finance Professional and has worked in multiple MNCs. However, he is also an avid tech reader and tinkerer with over 20 years of experience. His passions include 3D animation and drawing Illustrations. His creations can be viewed at www.artstation.com/abhifx