* Deprecates GDNative in favor of a simpler, lower level interface.
* New extension system allows registering core engine classes.
* Simple header interface in gdnative_interace.h
* Shader compilation is now cached. Subsequent loads take less than a millisecond.
* Improved game, editor and project manager startup time.
* Editor uses .godot/shader_cache to store shaders.
* Game uses user://shader_cache
* Project manager uses $config_dir/shader_cache
* Options to tweak shader caching in project settings.
* Editor path configuration moved from EditorSettings to new class, EditorPaths, so it can be available early on (before shaders are compiled).
* Reworked ShaderCompilerRD to ensure deterministic shader code creation (else shader may change and cache will be invalidated).
* Added shader compression with SMOLV: https://github.com/aras-p/smol-v
This can be used during unit test suite runs to hide error and warning
messages.
Care should be taken when using this feature, as it can hide important
information if used wrongly.
Happy new year to the wonderful Godot community!
2020 has been a tough year for most of us personally, but a good year for
Godot development nonetheless with a huge amount of work done towards Godot
4.0 and great improvements backported to the long-lived 3.2 branch.
We've had close to 400 contributors to engine code this year, authoring near
7,000 commit! (And that's only for the `master` branch and for the engine code,
there's a lot more when counting docs, demos and other first-party repos.)
Here's to a great year 2021 for all Godot users 🎆
