Godot 3.4 has been published as stable to continue with the development and consolidation of this Open Source graphics engine oriented to video games. Apart from the new features and improvements it brings, we can also highlight the emergence of the project itself, which is gradually making a dent in the scene mainstream after having gone unnoticed during its first years of life.
For starters, and as far as the kernel is concerned, Godot 3.4 has brought in the validity checks of objects for release builds. Another interesting novelty is that the File API is now capable of manipulating files of more than 2GiB, something that has been introduced with the intention of breaking limitations when dealing with large projects and that has been achieved thanks to the fact that everything has been refactored to use 64-bit unsigned integers, so Godot, as of launch, is capable of loading files up to 8.4TiB .
Keyboard input support has been improved to more effectively handle different keyboard layouts other than Anglo-QWERTY, for example causing movement key mapping to automatically switch from WASD to ZQSD on AZERTY keyboards. used in France and other French-speaking areas.
To finish off the kernel, the have been ported back AES-ECB and AES-CBC encryption and decryption methods to add cryptographic features , so “Godot can now save and load public keys, sign and verify a hash with an RSA key. and encrypt and decrypt RSA keys ”.
At the rendering level, in Godot 3.4 we find the selective removal of occlusion , a feature that also provides a solution to limit artificial intelligence and processing based on the proximity of the viewer. On the other hand, simple geometric occluders are being introduced to the scenes, starting with the spherical ones that are already available at the launch that concerns us in this post.
To finish with rendering, the new ACES Fitted tonemap provides a more realistic graphic finish thanks to better handling of the contrast of shiny objects and a 3D particle ring emitter with configurable radius and height has been included.
In terms of platforms, Godot 3.4 has implemented initial support for the new Android external storage API, which means that the engine begins to target the API level 30 of the Google mobile operating system in order to meet a requirement of Google Play. This is in addition to the replacement of APK expansion files (OBB) with Android App Bundle (AAB) binaries and more agile processing of input gestures to keep the game running even if the frame rate is not adjusted. keeps constant at 60fps.
Web projects in HTML5 have been improved thanks to the introduction of support to be installed as progressive web applications , the presence of a new JavaScript object (JavaScriptObject) to offer an interface between Godot and JavaScript and the possibility of using AudioWorklet to do use of a single process to adapt to a greater number of web browsers.
Physics is an important thing in a video game engine, so obviously this is another area that Godot tries to improve on with each release. In version 3.4 we have improvements for both 2D and 3D environments, faster and more reliable convex shell generation, and an improved collision layer grid. Leaving the physics, another point to take into account is the use of WebP by default for lossless texture compression instead of PNG.
We close our summary of the improvements and news of Godot 3.4 with the editor, which has included a renewed editor of themes of the user interface, improvements in translations mainly for Spanish and Simplified Chinese, as well as other improvements in the usability that They cover various sections such as the inspector and the manipulation gadget of the 3D editor.
All the details of Godot 3.4 can be found in the official announcement and the changelog . The application can be downloaded from the corresponding section on the project website for GNU / Linux (desktop and server), macOS and Windows.
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