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.
`--profile-gpu` was renamed to `--gpu-profile` for consistency with
`--gpu-abort`.
This also updates the shell completion files to the latest `master`
branch.
This has been superseded by GDExtension so this code is no longer useful
nor usable.
There's still some GDNative-related stuff in platform export code which
needs to be adapted for GDExtension (e.g. to include GDExtension libraries
in exports).
Add localizable string (Dictionary<Lang Code, String>) property editor and property hint.
Add localized "app name" property to the project settings.
Add localized permission and copyright properties to the macOS and iOS export settings.
Remove some duplicated ("app name") and deprecated ("info") macOS and iOS export properties.
All iOS devices since the iPhone 5S support ARMv8 (64-bit).
The last iOS version supported on ARMv7 devices is 10.x, which is
too old to run Godot 4.0 projects since the minimum supported
iOS version is 11.0.
Use an offline first approach, where we prefer the cached version over
the network one.
This forces games using PWA to always re-export the project and not just
the PCK, so that the service worker version gets updated correctly, and
the end-user cache is correctly cleared on update.
Threads are required for the web editor to function. If the web server
is not correctly configured, threads won't be available.
This makes troubleshooting easier for people looking to self-host
the web editor.
