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Game engine

Godot 4

We last looked at Godot a few years ago, with the release of Godot 3.0. Reflecting the ambition of that release, its coverage was consigned to our games page. But a lot has happened to the project since then. There was a $250,000 development grant from Epic, a $120,000 grant from the Russian game developer Kefir, and significant donations from Ubisoft and Embark Studios. Investments like these are rare for open source projects, and illustrate how important the project has become. It's certainly a better story than the one where a sole solitary developer works on some essential infrastructure in their spare time.

Godot has garnered this attention because it fills an important role, in much the same way that Linux does. It's an engine that helps developers create games, and the biggest and most widely used game engines are Unity and Unreal Engine (UE), both of which are unashamedly proprietary and even hostile towards portability. Developing a game for either system commits you to its APIs, rendering pipelines, and asset stores in much the same way that developing for Windows in the mid-1990s would lock you into its ecosystem. Godot is open source games development that won't lock you in, won't force you to install upgrades, and won't charge you a percentage of whatever you might sell your game for. More importantly, it will reward whatever effort you put into learning the platform with continued openness and relevance, much like the effort we've all invested in learning Linux.

Version 4 is a huge upgrade, and one that demarcates Godot's transition from an amateur's prototyping tool to a professional games development engine that can compete directly with Unity and UE's dominance. You can see this from your first glance over the user interface. The central scene view, the inspector, the scene explorer, and the node views all look consistent, slick, and professional. Behind the scenes, the 3D engine has seen great improvement, not just in low-powered OpenGL games, but in its quality and capabilities. There's a new Vulcan renderer, which will be great for Steam Deck development, as will support for AMD's FSR. There are new global illumination options, including voxel global illumination. There are advanced shadow renderers, volumetric fog, a new sky shader, and asset import capabilities with automatic LOD generation and occlusion culling. The end results are amazing, and put Godot's 3D output into the AAA league. It's also easy to explore these features, from both the excellent demos that come with the release, and from the panels around the 3D view.

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