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Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

godotengine.org

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Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#81
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that "it does not require ray tracing" means that it does not require extensions like RTX. Perhaps it uses voxel cone tracing, which you may say is technically not ray tracing, but if you called it ray tracing you wouldn't exactly be wrong either.

The article contrasts this approach with voxel cone tracing, so it's not that either.

I would call it Sphere Tracing since that's what it's called in "Hart, John, C; Sphere Tracing: A Geometric Method for the Antialiased Ray Tracing of Implicit Surfaces; The Visual Computer-1995"

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#82
post #50

So if I wanted to make a simple 2d game, should I go with godot, pygame, or a JavaScript game engine?

Asking the same question myself right now.. I was playing around with Gamemaker Studio yesterday and it seemed ok at first for something simple, but suddenly realized just how stupidly simple it is.. seems like it will be a pain to have any real control and do anything even a little bit complicated.

Yeah, I've heard stories from a number of gamedevs who have said that using Gamemaker for anything other than non trivial projects can get really difficult and messy really fast. Godot is a much more robust engine, while still being pretty beginner friendly.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#83
post #39
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a unity developer I'm drooling at godot. I can't wait to jump ship to open source. Don't get me wrong unity is great, but godot is super compelling.

There's one thing that make me reluctant to use Godot though and it's GDScript. Edit: Seems like it's not a problem anymore, can't wait to try again.

GDScript is very "python like", never feels like a hurdle.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#84
post #35
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business perspective, Unreal doesn't really do 2D as per se (Whereas Godot is very simple to use) so improving Godot keeps people away from other tools like Unity which do have features that compete with Unreal.

As a unity developer I'm drooling at godot. I can't wait to jump ship to open source. Don't get me wrong unity is great, but godot is super compelling.

You're not wrong, gdscript is pretty awful. It's only python-like for someone who's never used python. No list comprehensions, no tuples (which means no destructuring in assignment or function parameters), no first class functions, etc. It's like Python 1.x circa 1999, only worse.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#85
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a unity developer I'm drooling at godot. I can't wait to jump ship to open source. Don't get me wrong unity is great, but godot is super compelling.

I'm someone who isn't at all knowledgeable about game development nor its industry, so forgive my ignorance, but what are you waiting for specifically?

Yes, why are you waiting for Godot?

Sorry, I’ll get my coat.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#86
I get why Epic probably funds this, and I love to think how great Godot could be in another year or so (and how they could surpass Unity, etc). What I don't really understand, though: Why wouldn't Unity just implement this now, too?!

It's open-source & MIT-licensed; if it's better than Unity's GI -- and it IS better, because Unity does not currently have ANY realtime-GI solution in their latest versions (they stopped licensing Enlighten for current/2020.x+ versions) -- so why wouldn't Unity just implement this, too?

There's nothing that appears to be stopping them from doing so, other than pride perhaps; part of me really, really hope that they'll do exactly that, though I've yet to dive into the code to see how viable it may or may not be given Unity's current SRP situation(s).

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#87

Re-upping this blog post (sadly overlooked when first posted to HN) which asks the reasonable question 'why not just use Godot for general-purpose applications?' https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-ad...

We often hear saying game engines redraw every frame so it is not appropriate for UIs.

In Godot, you can set an option to redraw only when something change like in UI libs (for e.g Godot Editor use this option)

However , I think one main aspect missing from UI libs is damage tracking (=redraw only the part of the screen that changed and tell the compositor to also only redraw that part).

In terms of architecture, Godot is all I want. I wish I could build general purpose apps with it. Everything is a node & just simple trees. Abstraction of everything you need over all platforms. GDNative let you access everything from any language.

I really wish I could build everything with Godot. I enjoy it so much more than web dev or android dev even for UI

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#88
post #87

Re-upping this blog post (sadly overlooked when first posted to HN) which asks the reasonable question 'why not just use Godot for general-purpose applications?' https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-ad...

We often hear saying game engines redraw every frame so it is not appropriate for UIs. In Godot, you can set an option to redraw only when something change like in UI libs (for e.g Godot Editor use this option) However , I think one main aspect missing from UI libs is damage tracking (=redraw only the part of the screen that changed and tell the compositor to also only redraw that part). In terms of architecture, God…

>I wish I could build general purpose apps with it.

Why can't you?

I mentioned this in the previous thread about this, people build general purpose apps in Unity all the time. And Godot's own UI is a Godot application. There may be some edge cases where it doesn't work, but considering the current standard for native applications is to wrap webapps in individual Chrome instances, I can't see Godot being subpar.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#89

Re-upping this blog post (sadly overlooked when first posted to HN) which asks the reasonable question 'why not just use Godot for general-purpose applications?' https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-ad...

You can. This is exactly what Flutter does, as I've commented on that thread you refer to on HN. It uses the Skia renderer that is like a 2d game engine to draw all the elements on the screen. They've had to reimplement everything though, like text fields and accessibility, so perhaps this is why it's not done more often.

Any electron app is also a skia app and writing an app with skia only is needlessly too low level.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#90
post #48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Godot allow binding with multiple languages? You can even use Rust for that instead of GDScript.

The problem is few of those bindings are mature, nor can they be expected to remain up to date. I don't know of any games in Godot using anything but GDScript or C#. This will probably change in the future (I hope it does, and I really wish Godot just used WASM internally so any language that already compiled to it would work) but as of now it seems there's no point to using anything but GDScript or C#.

You mean bindings aren't stable and require reworking all the time?
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