Godot 3.0 is here
Vladimir and Estragon can finally get their 3D rendering done.
Anew major release of Godot, a 2D and 3D cross-platform open source game engine that enables developers to create games for PC, consoles, mobile and web platforms, is nearing release.
A YouTube video, which can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=XptlVErsL-o, shows off some of the new features that will be included in this release, such as a brand new 3D renderer that features physics-based rendering, real-time global illumination and improved postprocessing effects. Even with YouTube compression, the video does a great job of showing off how good these new features can make games created with Godot 3.0 look.
A new high-level network multiplayer API has been included to make creating online multiplayer games easier, plus a new audio engine built from the ground up should make games even more immersive. Support for C++ (GDNative), C# (Mono) and Visual Scripting means that Godot is an even more flexible alternative to Unity and Unreal Engine. It’s also been announced ( http://bit.ly/2eNC6tg) that Godot now supports glTF 2.0, a JSON-based and royalty-free format for transmitting and loading 3D scenes and models, created by the Khronos group, which is also behind the popular Vulkan API.
If you’re interested in checking out the benefits of Godot over other game engines, there’s a fantastic blog post ( http://bit.ly/2wKGTjj) by a game developer that outlines the benefits of Godot. If you fancy giving it a try, then the alpha build of Godot 3.0 can be downloaded from https://godotengine.org/download. And if you’d like to help the team financially, there is a Patreon campaign ( www.patreon.com/ godotengine) fund-raising page that enables you to help Juan Linietsky, who wrote most of the code himself, to work on the project full time.