Download Godot 2.0

GameFromScratch.com‘s overview of the new features in Godot 2.0. The update to the open-source game engine overhauls the scene editor and debugging workflows, and adds support for live scene editing.

Open-source Godot game engine has released a stable 2.0 release, overhauling the scene editor and code editor, updating the debugging tools, and adding support for live scene editing and plugin development.

So what is Godot?
Originally Argentinian developer Okam Studio‘s in-house engine, and made available as open source in 2014, Godot has been used in production on PC, mobile and console titles.

At the time, Okam described the engine as having “a similar feature set to Unity” with a “little less stuff on 3D front, much more stuff on the 2D front”.

On that 3D front, the engine supports skeleton-based and blendshape animation, render options including HDR, antialiasing and linear colour workflow, and a number of standard post effects.

Assets can be imported in standard 3D file formats, and there is a dedicated Collada exporter for Blender.

Games can be deployed to Windows, Mac OS X and Linux; Android, to iOS and Blackberry devices; and in HTML5 format. You can read an overview of the key features here.

New in Godot 2.0: improved editing and debugging workflows
According to the dev team, the main focus in Godot 2.0 was an overhaul of the engine’s scene editor, which gets a more streamlined, more contextual layout.

Users can also open multiple scenes simultaneously – Godot’s workflow centres around working with multiple sub-scenes – with the editor automatically reloading them when a dependency is updated.

The code editor and debugging tools have also been improved, adding new options to debug video memory use, to debug collision and navigation shapes, and debug games running on mobile hardware.

Another big change is support for live scene editing: Godot can now synchronise the editor with the running game, enabling users to see the results of changes in real time, as shown in the video above.

According to the devs, the implementation “does not allow easy [inspection of] the game from different editor cameras [but] it has the huge advantage of allowing editing [of] a level while it’s being played”.

Updates to the engine core, experimental support for plugins
In addition, there are a number of changes to the engine core, including support for scene inheritance – so one base scene can be used to hold assets common to all – and improved scene instancing.

Whereas Godot originally saved scenes and resources in XML format, Godot 2.0 introduces its own more-human readable text-based file format, with the intention of deprecating XML entirely in the 3.0 release.

In a separate announcement, the developers have also announced “work in progress” support for plugins, enabling users to extend Godot’s functionality without modifying the C++ code base.

The release announcement on the Godot Engine blog goes into a lot more detail on the new features, so it’s worth reading in full.

Future updates will focus on usability until at least Godot 2.1, before development priorities expand to include overhauling the 3D engine.

Availability
Godot Engine 2.0 is available now under an MIT licence. Binaries are available for 32 and 64-bit Windows and Linux and 32-bit Mac OS X, while the source code can be found on GitHub.

Related Posts