Latest Godot 4.5 Update: All Essential Details Explained
In a significant leap for the gaming industry, the open-source Godot Engine has released its latest version, Godot 4.5. This update brings numerous enhancements for game design, visual effects (VFX), and animation, making it an ideal choice for light 2D mobile game development and immersive VR/metaverse experiences.
One of the key features of Godot 4.5 is the reworked Forward+ and Mobile renderers, which now handle specular occlusion based on ambient light rather than just lightmaps. This change aims to provide more natural movement and poses, particularly beneficial for handling avatars in VR and metaverse environments.
Apple's own engineering team has been involved in the project, contributing to the development of new features. One such feature is the native support for Apple's XR platform, visionOS, making Godot projects compatible with the Apple Vision Pro. This marks the first new platform supported natively by Godot since the project was open-sourced.
The new Godot 4.5 also introduces the shader baker, a feature designed to address long startup times associated with shader compilation. When enabled in the export settings, the shader baker pre-compiles shaders in the right format used by the driver on the target platform, reducing load times.
Other significant improvements include chunk tilemap physics, which has been reworked to merge cell shapes into bigger collision shapes. This change is expected to boost performance in 2D scenes that rely heavily on physics.
Godot 4.5 also offers new animation constructors and constraints for animators. These include BoneConstraint3D, AimModifier3D, CopyTransformModifier3D, and ConvertTransformModifier3D. Additionally, the engine now supports stencil buffer, giving developers more control over memory buffers and enabling effects such as cutaway-style rendering, X-ray effects, outlines, and selective post-processing for specific objects.
To improve debugging, Godot 4.5 adds backtracing and custom loggers. These features provide detailed error information, including in release builds, and enable custom bug reporting tools with more accurate data.
It's important to note that currently, exported projects can only appear as a "windowed app" in the user's 3D space. However, plans for future updates include support for fully immersive experiences for the Apple Vision Pro.
For a general introduction to Godot Engine, see our explainer "what is Godot Engine?". Godot Engine 4.5 remains free, open-source, and relatively easy to use with its GDscript scripting language.
With these new features and the continued involvement of Apple's engineering team, Godot Engine 4.5 is poised to revolutionise the way we design and develop light 2D mobile games and immersive VR/metaverse experiences.
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