As announced in https://godotengine.org/article/godot-4-will-discontinue-visual-scripting,
Godot maintainers have agreed to discontinue the current implementation of
our VisualScript language.
The way it had been designed was not user-friendly enough and we did not
succeed in improving its usability to actually make it a good low-code
solution for users who need one.
So we prefer to remove it for Godot 4.0 and leave the door open for new,
innovative ideas around visual scripting, to be developed as plugins or
extensions now that Godot provides sufficient functionality for this
(notably via GDExtension and the godot-cpp C++ bindings).
The current module has been moved to a dedicated repository (with full Git
history extracted with `git filter-branch`):
https://github.com/godotengine/godot-visual-script
It can still be compiled as a C++ module (for now, but will likely require
work to be kept in sync with the engine repository), but our hope is that
contributors will port it to GDExtension (which is quite compatibile with
the existing C++ module code when using the godot-cpp C++ bindings).
We're targeting .NET 5 for now to make development easier while
.NET 6 is not yet released.
TEMPORARY REGRESSIONS
---------------------
Assembly unloading is not implemented yet. As such, many Godot
resources are leaked at exit. This will be re-implemented later
together with assembly hot-reloading.
The new default window size is tuned to:
- Have a 16:9 aspect ratio,
- Have both dimensions divisible by 8 to better play along with
video recording,
- Be displayable correctly in windowed mode on a 1366×768 display
(tested on Windows 10 with default settings).
This breaks compatibility with projects that didn't change the
window size from the default value (or that kept one of the values
to its default).
This provides a benefit similar to FSR 1.0 (greater texture sharpness
at the cost of some graininess at sub-native resolution scales), but
without the added performance cost of FSR 1.0.
This is consistent with the BaseMaterial3D filtering options.
It can be used for high-quality pixel art textures that remain sharp
when viewed at oblique angles, but prevents them from becoming grainy
thanks to mipmaps.
- Adds more customization options to ProjectSettings.
- Displays navregion edge connections and navigation polygon edges in editor and at runtime.
- Majority of debug code moved from SceneTree to NavigationServer.
- Removes the irritating debug MeshInstance child node from NavigationRegion3D and replaces it with direct RenderingServer API.
Mipmap LOD bias can be useful to improve the appearance of distant
textures without increasing anisotropic filtering (or in situations
where anisotropic filtering is not effective).
`fsr_mipmap_bias` was renamed to `texture_mipmap_bias` accordingly.
The property hint now allows for greater precision as well.
This PR implements a worked thread pool. It uses a fixed amount of threads in a pool and allows scheduling tasks
that can be run on threads (and then waited for). It satisfies the following use cases:
* HTML5 thread count is fixed (and similar restrictions are known in consoles) so we need to reuse threads.
* Thread spawning is slow in general, so reusing threads is faster anyway.
* This implementation supports recursive waiting for tasks, making it less prone to deadlocks if threads from the pool also run tasks.
After this is approved and merged, subsequent PRs will be needed to replace the ThreadWorkPool usage by this class.
`rendering/quality/shadows` is now `rendering/quality/positional_shadow`
to explicitly denote that the settings only affect positional light shadows,
not directional light shadows.
Shadow atlas settings now contain the word "atlas" for easier searching.
Soft shadow quality settings were renamed to contain the word "filter".
This makes the settings appear when searching for "filter" in the
project settings dialog, like in Godot 3.x.
- Rename audio mix rate setting as the suffix is now part of the
property hint. This is also more consistent with existing mix rate
project settings.
- Improve the MovieWriter class reference.
- Tweak warning message about audio possibly going out of sync.
* Allows running the game in "movie writer" mode.
* It ensures entirely stable framerate, so your run can be saved stable and with proper sound (which is impossible if your CPU/GPU can't sustain doing this in real-time).
* If disabling vsync, it can save movies faster than the game is run, but if you want to control the interaction it can get difficult.
* Implements a simple, default MJPEG writer.
This new features has two main use cases, which have high demand:
* Saving game videos in high quality and ensuring the frame rate is *completely* stable, always.
* Using Godot as a tool to make movies and animations (which is ideal if you want interaction, or creating them procedurally. No other software is as good for this).
**Note**: This feature **IS NOT** for capturing real-time footage. Use something like OBS, SimpleScreenRecorder or FRAPS to achieve that, as they do a much better job at intercepting the compositor than Godot can probably do using Vulkan or OpenGL natively. If your game runs near real-time when capturing, you can still use this feature but it will play no sound (sound will be saved directly).
Usage:
$ godot --write-movie movie.avi [scene_file.tscn]
Missing:
* Options for configuring video writing via GLOBAL_DEF
* UI Menu for launching with this mode from the editor.
* Add to list of command line options.
* Add a feature tag to override configurations when movie writing (fantastic for saving videos with highest quality settings).
This is done to prevent reducing texture quality when it doesn't save
much video memory, especially for pixel art.
The size threshold can be adjusted in the project settings.
To get the previous behavior where textures detected to be used in 3D
had their compression mode always set to VRAM, set this to the lowest value
(16).
When an exported project crashes, the crash handler message
shouldn't reference the Godot issue tracker, as not all crashes
are Godot's fault.
Reporting crashes that only occur on exported projects is still allowed,
but it should not be done by people who aren't working on the project
in question.
