This commit adds the following properties to GeometryInstance3D: `visibility_range_begin`,
`visibility_range_begin_margin`, `visibility_range_end`, `visibility_range_end_margin`.
Together they define a range in which the GeometryInstance3D will be visible from the camera,
taking hysteresis into account for state changes. A begin or end value of 0 will be ignored,
so the visibility range can be open-ended in both directions.
This commit also adds the `visibility_parent` property to 'Node3D'.
Which defines the visibility parents of the node and its subtree (until
another parent is defined).
Visual instances with a visibility parent will only be visible when the parent, and all of its
ancestors recursively, are hidden because they are closer to the camera than their respective
`visibility_range_begin` thresholds.
Combining visibility ranges and visibility parents users can set-up a quick HLOD system
that shows high detail meshes when close (i.e buildings, trees) and merged low detail meshes
for far away groups (i.e. cities, woods).
Added an occlusion culling system with support for static occluder meshes.
It can be enabled via `Project Settings > Rendering > Occlusion Culling > Use Occlusion Culling`.
Occluders are defined via the new `Occluder3D` resource and instanced using the new
`OccluderInstance3D` node. The occluders can also be automatically baked from a
scene using the built-in editor plugin.
-Advanced Settings toggle also hides advanced properties when disabled
-Simplified Advanced Bar (errors were just plain redundant)
-Reorganized rendering quality settings.
-Reorganized miscelaneous settings for clean up.
-Rendering server now uses a split RID allocate/initialize internally, this allows generating RIDs immediately but initialization to happen later on the proper thread (as rendering APIs generally requiere to call on the right thread).
-RenderingServerWrapMT is no more, multithreading is done in RenderingServerDefault.
-Some functions like texture or mesh creation, when renderer supports it, can register and return immediately (so no waiting for server API to flush, and saving staging and command buffer memory).
-3D physics server changed to be made multithread friendly.
-Added PhysicsServer3DWrapMT to use 3D physics server from multiple threads.
-Disablet Bullet (too much effort to make multithread friendly, this needs to be fixed eventually).
-All shadow rendering is done with raster now (no compute)
-All shadow rendering is done by rendering directly to the shadow atlas
-Improved how buffer clearing is done to optimize the above.
-Ability to set shadows as 16 bits.
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 🎆
-Happens on import by default for all models
-Just works (tm)
-Biasing can be later adjusted per node or per viewport (as well as globally)
-Disabled AABB.get_support test because its broken
