Godot Engine 4.0 Alpha 1 is out with Vulkan support, rendering overhaul

Free and open source game dev tech Godot Engine is jumping up a few levels today with the absolutely massive release of Godot Engine 4.0 Alpha 1. This is going to change the game in huge ways.

This version has been in development for multiple years, with an aim to bring Godot closer to the graphical power and standards being set by the bigger lot (Unity / Unreal etc). All work being done has been in addition to the usual updates to the 3.x branch that is still ongoing too. Godot 4 though brings with it massive changes to the very core of Godot.

3D Scene example from Godot 4 with reflections

Some of the major additions include:

• Vulkan API support with two backends:
  • Clustered – for desktop.
  • Vulkan Mobile – speaks for itself, but also supports desktop – meant for simpler games.
• Absolutely masses of new graphics features like: specular mapping when using 2D lighting, fully real-time VoxelGI, signed distance field-based global illumination (SDFGI) for open world lighting, volumetric fog with optional GI contribution, new GPU-based lightmapper and the list goes on.
• Shader compiler rewritten from scratch.
• Major text rendering upgrades, with right-to-left language support.
• Overhaul to importing 3D assets, with a big speed bump too.
• New TileMap and TileSet editors with better usability.
• Godot Physics system to replace Bullet.
• Support for multiple windows of the Editor.
• GDScript was rewritten from scratch with a cleaner approach.

See the full announcement post on the Godot blog. A full list of changes is still being put together that you can see up on GitHub and it’s pretty long!