| Godot 4.1 Improves Performance |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Monday, 17 July 2023 |
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Godot has been updated with improvements including performance and stability. Godot 4.1 builds on the 4.0 release that was described as being more of a great rebuild rather than a regular update. Godot is an open-source, cross-platform game engine that is increasingly popular as a rival to commercial alternatives. It was made available under open source in 2014, and since then has added features to become a strong choice, especially for 2D game development.
Much of the work in Godot 4.0 focused on internals, starting with refactored ObjectID and Variants. This change both improved performance and fixed a design flaw in Godot 3.0 that meant it wasn't always possible tell if an object instance was freed or not, resulting in bugs that could not be fixed. Version 4 also removed support for PoolArrays as a type of variable. These were designed for 32 bits CPUs with small address space, and the developers say that as the vast majority of mainstream platforms are now 64 bits, this optimization is no longer required. Other improvements in 4.0 included support for callable types, for named binds in the Skin system, and for StringNames in the binding system. The threaded resource loading was also refactored to make use of as many cores as available by your CPU to do resource loading. The developers say this results in 4x to 6x performance increases, and in considerably improves the usability for background loading. Version 4.1 has now been released with bug fixes, performance updates, and improved AI navigation avoidance and the ability to detach code editors and put them on other displays. The performance improvement comes from a change to the algorithm used when adding or removing child nodes. Godot games are built as a tree of nodes, and the engine needs to add and remove them extremely often. The algorithm now uses a fast hashmap, which the developers say makes adding and removing child nodes several times faster. This version also introduces experimental multithreading for your scenes. On the rendering side, the Vulkan renderer got a pipeline cache. This aims to reduce pipeline compilation stutter. Particle turbulence was also reworked in this version based on artists’ feedback to offer greater creative control. Elsewhere, there's now support for static variables in scripting, and feature parity between C# and GDScript. Godot 4.1 is available now.
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