Godot 3.4 Has Been Released
The new version comes with new major features, bug fixes, and a revamped UI theme editor.
After more than 6 months of development, the Godot team has released a new and improved version of their open-source game engine – Godot 3.4. According to the team, the focus was on adding new features, fixing bugs, and optimizing the existing features, making them more reliable. The release itself improves Godot’s physics engine and renderer, adds support for Portal Occlusion Culling, adds ACES Fitted tonemapper, introduces a new UI theme editor, and adds support for glTF export.
Features:
- Portal Occlusion Culling: Godot 3.4 introduces portal occlusion culling, which is a tried and tested occlusion solution that has been used in many games, but does require some manual setup of the scene. As well as performing occlusion culling it also provides a solution for throttling AI and processing based on proximity to the viewer.
- ACES Fitted tonemapper: Godot 3.4 adds a new ACES Fitted tonemapper option that allows scenes to look more realistic by correctly handling the contrast of bright objects.
- Ring emitter for 3D particles: The release adds a new ring emitter for 3D particles which can emit particles on a ring or hollow cylinder with configurable radii and height.
- Rendering improvements: The update adds basic support for CPU blendshapes in GLES2, fixes draw order of transparent materials with multiple directional lights in GLES3, fixes depth sorting of meshes with transparent textures, adds new 3D inverse-squared point light attenuation as an option, and more.
- Revamped collision layer grid in the inspector: The layer grid widget has been improved to be more readable and support up to 32 collision layers in physics.
- Improvements and new features in Godot Physics 3D: Support for Height Map shapes with the same optimizations as in Bullet, support for Sync to Physics, and various fixes for RigidBody and KinematicBody.
- Export 3D scenes as glTF: The update adds the ability to export scenes as glTF. This means you can build a scene in Godot using your favorite tools such as CSG, and then bring all of the mesh data into other 3D applications such as Blender or other Godot versions.
- Revamped UI theme editor: The editor tools for theming and skinning have been overhauled. The new theme editor aims to make it as straightforward as possible to adjust your control nodes. You have an improved listing of available properties that can be easily overridden for your project. A control picker allows you to visually select the node you want to customize right from the preview panel. You can have custom previews from the scenes that make sense for your project. Styleboxes of the same type can be edited together to save you time adjusting their margins and borders. And theming power users can enjoy a new item management dialog that gives a lot of granularity when doing bulk adjustments to Theme resources.
You can learn more about Godot 3.4 here. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
