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 🎆
Moved previously builtin modules 'GameCenter', 'AppStore', 'iCloud' to separate modules to be represented as plugin.
Modified 'ARKit' and 'Camera' to not be builtin into engine and work as plugin.
Changed platform code so it's not affected by the move.
Modified Xcode project file to remove parameters that doesn't make any effect.
Added basic '.gdip' plugin config file.
Enabled ARC for iOS.
Weakify/Strongify macros for objc blocks.
Removed old version checks.
Specific types for ObjC++ modules to exclude unneeded bridging.
Separate DeviceMetrics class for device specific data.
Replaced old/deprecated functionality.
Add VMA to iphone platform Use linkflag for iphone building to enforce static linking. Works fine with dynamic '.framework' library
Updated xcode project to use '.a' static library
"Bundle Identifier" is more well-understood among macOS and iOS
developers and is less ambiguous.
This is a slight breaking change as export presets will need to be
updated to account for this change.
See https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/pull/3295.
As per #36436, we now need C++17's guaranteed copy elision feature to
solve ambiguities in Variant.
Core developers discussed the idea to move from C++14 to C++17 as our
minimum required C++ standard, and all agreed. Note that this doesn't
mean that Godot is going to be written in "modern C++", but we'll use
modern features where they make sense to simplify our "C with classes"
codebase. Apart from new code written recently, most of the codebase
still has to be ported to use newer features where relevant.
Proper support for C++17 means that we need recent compiler versions:
- GCC 7+
- Clang 6+
- VS 2017 15.7+
Additionally, C++17's `std::shared_mutex` (conditionally used by
`vk_mem_alloc.h` when C++17 support is enabled) is only available in
macOS 10.12+, so we increase our minimum supported version.
Due to the port to Vulkan and complete redesign of the rendering backend,
the `drivers/gles3` code is no longer usable in this state and is not
planned to be ported to the new architecture.
The GLES2 backend is kept (while still disabled and non-working) as it
will eventually be ported to serve as the low-end renderer for Godot 4.0.
Some GLES3 features might be selectively ported to the updated GLES2
backend if there's a need for them, and extensions we can use for that.
So long, OpenGL driver bugs!
