Godot Engine is a feature-rich, cross-platform game engine for creating 2D and 3D games from a unified interface.
Several days ago the game engine development team of Godot officially released its latest version, Godot 4.0 which adds Vulkan support, global illumination systems have been completely rewritten, volumetric fog is now supported, among other things.
Godot is a 2D/3D game engine. One of its most important features is that it is released as open source software (under the MIT license) and can be used for free at any scale of development and sale.
That being said, Godot was first released to the public in 2014, so it was a relatively late arrival on the game engine market. Game developers use it as an alternative to Unity/Unreal Engine, which has a large market share. Many popular titles have been released using this engine as well, including Brotato, a 2D roguelite, and Cruelty Squad.
Main new features of Godot 4.0
In this new version that is presented of Godot 4.0 it is mentioned that this update is "the biggest update of the longest development period in history" and it is that in This new version that presents the physics has been significantly improved, since marks a grand return of Godot's in-house 3D physics engine, Godot Physics.
For years, Godot has relied on the Bullet engine to provide a solid foundation for its 3D projects. However, we felt that a custom, game-specific fix would give us more flexibility when implementing new features and fixing issues.
On the performance front, techniques such as wide phase optimization were implemented and multi-threading for 2D and 3D environments.
As well it stands out that I know the physics API better along with a major reorganization of the nodes physics and improve many APIs/behaviors to make the experience more user friendly. Besides, the new CharacterBody node now replaced the old kinematic bodies to improve behavior in 2D and 3. This allows for an advanced character handler out of the box with new configurable properties for more flexibility.
In addition to that, scripting support has also been improved, significant work has been done on the Godot editor, etc. With Godot 4.0, the team says the game engine has been rebuilt from the ground up and it's the biggest update yet.
The team added that future 4.x releases will come at a much faster cadence, allowing them to quickly iterate on new features and improvements to what they already do. According to the Godot 4.0 release notes, one of the first major changes is that Godot's core has been overhauled through refactoring (reorganization of the internal structure of the program).
In addition to this engine code rework, a wide range of functions have been added, The main additions being support for the Vulkan rendering engine and a new global illumination system that has been redesigned from the ground up.
The Godot editor itself has been made more user-friendly and a number of other features and improvements have been added, including visual effects, animation, sound, netcode, and multilingual support.
On the other hand, the UI editor itself has been improved in a number of ways that simplify your workflow and give you better control of your interfaces.
Also the new theme editor provides better tools for creating complex skins and simplifies the user interface design workflow.
Finally, if you want to know more about it, you can check the details In the following link.
Get Godot 4.0
Godot is available for download at this page for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. You can also find it at Steam y itch.io.
The game engine code, game development environment, and related development tools (physics engine, sound server, 2D/3D rendering backends, etc.) are distributed under the MIT license.