passivestar

working on procedural rock formations

with a layer of sand

planar reflections in godot

there are also contact shadows there btw, vegetation is excluded from the shadowmap for performance

wowie look at my animated decal so very high tech

4.8 will be the strongest godot release in a while texture streaming, contact shadows, multi-bounce AO, lightmap specular, 3d trails, mesh buffers on gpu, visual shader groups, label text fitting, symbol renaming, more flexible editor layout and a lot of ui improvements what are you still missing?

just learned ambientCG has blender 5.2 remote asset library (no addon needed) 1k for free, all resolutions if you support on patreon this is cool af

this is probably one of the best ways to spend five bucks because they are CC0 assets. libraries like that make 3d art accessible to everyone

to add it to blender you just paste this link when you add a remote library: ambientcg.com/api/blender/

just learned ambientCG has blender 5.2 remote asset library (no addon needed) 1k for free, all resolutions if you support on patreon this is cool af

ucupaint button works with remote libraries too, you can open them to ucupaint layers to tweak and mix

I'm not super excited about blurry 50 fps gaming where it takes your $3000 gpu several frames to converge light into a discernible picture. I love how great games got to look but the tradeoffs we took aren't very good imo We need nice baked GI again that runs on a laptop you found behind a dumpster

MetalPetal@metalpetalart.bsky.social

im so glad you're working on the lightmapper.

The lightmapper has many issues. I've fixed some before but recently I've been playing more with it to get a better understanding of how it works. It seems most issues wont be a one line fix but at least it's fun to tinker with

channeling my inner sebastian lague into trying to make sense of indirect light tracing

youtube.comCoding Adventure: Ray TracingYouTube video by Sebastian Lague

this video has been really helpful, most of the theory directly applies to baking www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz0K...

the reason godot lightmapper leaks through walls is... interesting it thinks they are transparent!

that's because lightmapper determines alpha from bilinearly filtered albedo-alpha atlas, and padding around the islands is 0 alpha. filtering between solid walls and transparent padding gives lightmapper semi-transparent walls

interestingly this is not specific to low-res, you won't get rid of these leaks just by increasing the lightmap resolution, you'll just get smaller leaks

the reason godot lightmapper leaks through walls is... interesting it thinks they are transparent!

it's not the only bug, full picture is: half-texel offset moves sampled texel surface partially outside, halton AA spreads samples for smooth shadows, then those samples are biased towards the light and biasing there is very big so they end up even further from the wall, all outside!

the crazy part though is that even if we get rid of the half texel offset and set the directional light shadow blur to 0 to sample only from the texel center where we can guarantee that it's inside, it still leaks! it hits the wall as it should but then continues towards the sun

looking at leaks in lowres godot lightmaps: - dilation touches neighbors - there's no way to increase island padding, bicubic filter needs 4 texels - denoiser doesnt have island isolation - closed rooms leak through corners, probably a bias bug - unocclusion algorithm is imprecise seems solvable

Late Godot 4.x releases including 4.8 feel like an inflection point where the engine is starting to feel like a dependable tool

It looks like a very important factor for godot success will be the ecosystem growth The asset store is a big step in that direction, but the engine itself will also need to become more extensible to give people freedom to shape it into whatever they want and help provide what's missing in core

Thanks everyone in the community for your awesome work, love you all ❤️

Late Godot 4.x releases including 4.8 feel like an inflection point where the engine is starting to feel like a dependable tool

Today I can't remember the last time I saw an engine crash or a blocking bug. It is also becoming increasingly rare to find a feature gap that has no workarounds It took a lot of work by a lot of passionate people to get us to this point!

The goalpost is now moving from merely trying to get the engine to work and adding essential stuff to making it into something *truly great*

Late Godot 4.x releases including 4.8 feel like an inflection point where the engine is starting to feel like a dependable tool

In 2023 when I started with godot although it was not a new engine it was still a bug report simulator and it had big feature gaps too It felt fine for early adoption but at that time I was recommending unity to anyone who was under immediate pressure to ship a 3d game

godot 4.8 added non-allocating physics queries, 9x faster raycast i know, i know, about time 😄

github.com/godotengine/...

github.com`PhysicsDirectSpaceState2D`/`3D`: Add non-allocating query methods by aterray · Pull Request #113970 · godotengine/godotThis PR adds new query methods to PhysicsDirectSpaceState2D/3D that write results into typed result objects. This avoids allocating dictionary and array results for each query, improving performanc...

21 Sept

godot 4.8 exposed mesh buffers to gpu compute. all sorts of cool procedural shit is possible now

github.com/godotengine/...

21 Sept

github.comExpose mesh surface RD buffer RIDs to GDExtension by realkotob · Pull Request #118973 · godotengine/godotCloses godotengine/godot-proposals#14741 Adds Mesh equivalents of MultiMesh's multimesh_get_buffer_rd_rid so GPU-driven mesh workflows in a GDExtension can write directly into a surface's v...

19 Sept

been looking into that and it seems possible. LightmapGIData gives all APIs to set our own data. UV2 unwrapping is separate from baking so doesnt need porting. I'll need to port atlas packing though but it should be fine

passivestar@passivestar.bsky.social

considering reimplementing godot lightmapper in gdscript because it needs a lot of work and working in c++ is slow

19 Sept

making acceleration structures in gdscript is a bit concerning, will need to test to see if it's a problem. Worst case maybe could look into doing it on gpu or smth

19 Sept

everything after that is just gpu and should be as fast as native - tracing, denoising, blending seams, etc. it's the same glsl code

16 Sept

dropdown

16 Sept

was wondering why text looked ass, turns out godot has different glyph subpixel positioning modes

11 Sept

considering reimplementing godot lightmapper in gdscript because it needs a lot of work and working in c++ is slow

12 Sept

few things to fix/add: thin wall leaks curved surface seams denoiser discontinuities broken custom sky broken scaled meshes needs to not block editor needs runtime bake needs better debug views better probe ux receive/contribute-only meshes optional ao boost frustum preview faster iterative rebakes

godotengine.orgGodot Community Poll 2026 – Godot EngineWe want to learn more about the Godot community, understand who the users of the engine are, and find out how we can better support you.

12 Aug

manifold

passivestar reposted

Game Maker's Toolkit

@gamemakerstoolkit.com

27 July

Well, it finally happened! After 9 years of Unity dominance, Godot was the most used game engine for GMTK Game Jam 2026 submissions. 🤖 Godot - 47% 🎮 Unity - 34% 🛠️GameMaker - 5% 🚀 Unreal Engine - 3% ✨ Other - 11%

passivestar reposted

Godot Engine

@godotengine.org

16 July

The 2026 Godot Community Poll is here: Takes about ten minutes to complete, and it's one of the more direct ways to influence where things head next. We want to hear from you! 📝 godotengine.org/article/godo...