The UWP platform port was never ported to the Godot 4.0+ API,
and it's now accumulating bitrot as it doesn't compile, and thus
we no longer propagate platform changes in it.
So we finally remove to acknowledge this state. There's still some
interest in reviving the UWP port eventually, especially as support
for Direct3D 12 will soon be merged, but when that happens it will
be easiest to redo it from scratch.
This allows limiting framerate on any project, which is useful to
reduce power usage and latency with certain setups (such as VRR displays).
This is particularly useful in projects that do not expose a setting to change
the FPS limit. While external FPS limiters can be used, they can be cumbersome
to set up and result in increased input lag compared to a built-in FPS limiter.
Move the benchmarking measuring methods from `Engine` to `OS` to allow for platform specific overrides (e.g: can be used to hook into platform specific benchmarking and tracing capabilities).
4 years of development.
12,000 merged pull requests.
7,000 fixed issues.
1,500 individual contributors across engine and docs.
The Godot 4.0 release is by all metrics our biggest release so far.
No stone has been left unturned, all parts of the engine have been
modernized, refactored, overhauled, rewritten, redesigned.
Our work is far from done. Many areas still have significant known issues,
and will require focused work from all willing contributors to fix blocking
bugs, implement missing features, optimize for performance or compatibility,
and improve the user experience.
But Godot 4.0 marks the start of the new, modern Godot Engine, and a solid
foundation for us all to build upon. Future 4.x releases will come with a
much faster cadence, enabling us to iterate quickly on new features and
improvements to what we already provide.
To all of you who were involved in making Godot 4.0 what it is today, however
big or small your contributions were:
THANK YOU!
This was a massive undertaking, and you all participated in unique and
wonderful ways to build a free and open source game engine for everyone to
use and enjoy. You are breathtaking! <3
As many open source projects have started doing it, we're removing the
current year from the copyright notice, so that we don't need to bump
it every year.
It seems like only the first year of publication is technically
relevant for copyright notices, and even that seems to be something
that many companies stopped listing altogether (in a version controlled
codebase, the commits are a much better source of date of publication
than a hardcoded copyright statement).
We also now list Godot Engine contributors first as we're collectively
the current maintainers of the project, and we clarify that the
"exclusive" copyright of the co-founders covers the timespan before
opensourcing (their further contributions are included as part of Godot
Engine contributors).
Also fixed "cf." Frenchism - it's meant as "refer to / see".
Non-exhaustive list of case-sensitive renames:
GDExtension -> GDNative
GDNATIVE -> GDEXTENSION
gdextension -> gdnative
ExtensionExtension ->Extension (for where there was GDNativeExtension)
EXTENSION_EXTENSION ->EXTENSION (for where there was GDNATIVE_EXTENSION)
gdnlib -> gdextension
gdn_interface -> gde_interface
gdni -> gde_interface
Add export options to set Settings and Notification icons on export.
Automatically fill background of the app store icon instead of failing (with warning).
Update development region to use `en` instead of `English`.
Uses html-eslint for HTML file and eslint-plugin-html for inline
JavaScript.
Use HTML5 (not XHTML), remove CDATA and trailing slashes for self
closing tags.
Add format checks to CI.
Implements https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/3371.
New `target` presets
====================
The `tools` option is removed and `target` changes to use three new presets,
which match the builds users are familiar with. These targets control the
default optimization level and enable editor-specific and debugging code:
- `editor`: Replaces `tools=yes target=release_debug`.
* Defines: `TOOLS_ENABLED`, `DEBUG_ENABLED`, `-O2`/`/O2`
- `template_debug`: Replaces `tools=no target=release_debug`.
* Defines: `DEBUG_ENABLED`, `-O2`/`/O2`
- `template_release`: Replaces `tools=no target=release`.
* Defines: `-O3`/`/O2`
New `dev_build` option
======================
The previous `target=debug` is now replaced by a separate `dev_build=yes`
option, which can be used in combination with either of the three targets,
and changes the following:
- `dev_build`: Defines `DEV_ENABLED`, disables optimization (`-O0`/`/0d`),
enables generating debug symbols, does not define `NDEBUG` so `assert()`
works in thirdparty libraries, adds a `.dev` suffix to the binary name.
Note: Unlike previously, `dev_build` defaults to off so that users who
compile Godot from source get an optimized and small build by default.
Engine contributors should now set `dev_build=yes` in their build scripts or
IDE configuration manually.
Changed binary names
====================
The name of generated binaries and object files are changed too, to follow
this format:
`godot.<platform>.<target>[.dev][.double].<arch>[.<extra_suffix>][.<ext>]`
For example:
- `godot.linuxbsd.editor.dev.arm64`
- `godot.windows.template_release.double.x86_64.mono.exe`
Be sure to update your links/scripts/IDE config accordingly.
More flexible `optimize` and `debug_symbols` options
====================================================
The optimization level and whether to generate debug symbols can be further
specified with the `optimize` and `debug_symbols` options. So the default
values listed above for the various `target` and `dev_build` combinations
are indicative and can be replaced when compiling, e.g.:
`scons p=linuxbsd target=template_debug dev_build=yes optimize=debug`
will make a "debug" export template with dev-only code enabled, `-Og`
optimization level for GCC/Clang, and debug symbols. Perfect for debugging
complex crashes at runtime in an exported project.
- `_DEBUG` is MSVC specific so it didn't make much sense to define for
Android and iOS builds.
- iOS was the only platform to define `DEBUG`. We don't use it anywhere
outside thirdparty code, which we usually don't intend to debug, so it
seems better to be consistent with other platforms.
- Consistently define `NDEBUG` to disable assert behavior in both `release`
and `release_debug` targets. This used to be set for `release` for all
platforms, and `release_debug` for Android and iOS only.
- Due to the above, I removed the only use we made of `assert()` in Godot
code, which was only implemented for Unix anyway, should have been
`DEV_ENABLED`, and is in PoolAllocator which we don't actually use.
- The denoise and recast modules keep defining `NDEBUG` even for the `debug`
target as we don't want OIDN and Embree asserting all over the place.
- Print all StringNames, not just the top 100.
- Print statistics at the end of the list of StringNames,
with unreferenced and rarely referenced StringNames.
- List the CLI argument in `--help` and shell completion.
