Tuesday, February 4th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Godot Engine wins $250,000 Epic MegaGrant


Godot Engine been awarded a $250,000 MegaGrant by Epic Games. The money will be used to improve the game engine’s rendering capabilities, and its built-in development language, GDScript.

Godot is the third open-source graphics tool to win a MegaGrant since the scheme was launched last year, following a $1.2 million grant for Blender and a smaller grant to the Krita Foundation.

Backing for Godot 4.0’s new Vulkan-based rendering backend
According to the Godot blog, the development team is “still discussing the next steps”, but had “expressed the wish to use the grant to improve graphics rendering [and] GDScript” in its application.

The former is a major ongoing project: the Godot team has been working on a replacement for Godot’s existing OpenGL ES 3.x rendering backend based on the Vulkan API since 2018.

The new backend is due to roll out in Godot 4.0 and will be compatibility-breaking: Godot 3.2, released last week, will also receive long-term support for users who don’t want to port projects across.

Now the third most widely used engine for indie games?
The latest grant is the first Epic Games has made to a tool that competes directly with Unreal Engine, its own commercial game engine, and confirms Godot’s growing status in the industry.

Of the 9,500-plus entries submitted to the 2020 Global Game Jam, Godot was the third most popular engine, behind Unity and UE4, but ahead of CryEngine, Lumberyard, and commercial 2D authoring tools.

In a tweet, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney congratulated the Godot team for “showing that a pemissively licensed open source 3D engine can succeed at scale”.

Read more about the new Epic MegaGrant on the Godot blog