GodotEngine Vulkan Progress Report #1 Published

Howdy, partners! 🙂

Juan Linietsky from the GodotEngine team just published an update regarding their efforts to update the engine’s underlying architecture so that it has proper Vulkan support. Of note is commentary on the sheer length of writing Vulkan initialization code as it applies to displays, as well as “halfway” progress made on the 2D portions of the engine.

The article, which discusses several aspects of working with Vulkan, indicates that most of the “Godot 3.x feature set” will be rewritten by October. Given that that’s only three months away, that’s a very promising sign!

I know I’m looking forward to trying out the new Vulkan renderer on my machine when it’s ready, so I will keep you all updated as things progress! 😀

Cheers! 🙂

Godot Engine 2.1.2 Released

Hello! 🙂

The folks over at the Godot Engine team pushed-out a maintenance release recently. You can read about the update here, and a download link should be provided inside of the article as well (though, there is also a download link inside of the “Tools” page of this blog).

The great thing about Godot is the minimal amount of dependencies required in order to install and run this piece of software. It’s also great for those of us who like to compile everything from scratch. 😉

Happy Game Making!

Cheers!

Update: 6-17-16

Howdy!

I’ve updated the Tools page with another piece of Free/Libre Open-Source Software: Krita.

Krita is a project that allows users to create cool images via a very intuitive digital painting interface. I’ve just downloaded it and will be trying it out for texture painting (I recommend that you do the same).

In some belated news, my pull request for the Godot Engine was merged into the project’s master branch! Users should now no longer need an external mouse in order to navigate 3D scenes. My PR added rotation/panning support for all trackpads, which was a feature I felt was sorely needed. 🙂

You can download the Godot Engine here. Feel free to post below with your thoughts on the engine, I know that the team that supports it is very open minded.

Besides that, nothing new to report. Keep on rockin’!

Cheers! 🙂

Update: 10-15-14

Aloha!

I’ve started development on the engine. So far, I’ve abstracted the input interface and am currently testing it inside a program I wrote. Right now, the application simply displays an arrow which can be moved around the screen via a gamepad’s analog stick. I’m proud of myself because, with the proper abstractions, my “main” file is just two lines of code! 🙂

Speaking of which, that will probably be the topic of my next article: “Design Patterns”!

After browsing the internet briefly this morning, I noticed that some other commercial engines support “Linux Development”, but aren’t open-source, or free. In particular, a company that makes one of them has partnered with Canonical (*growl*) and their engine is offered for $199.00 on the Ubuntu software center. That makes me a sad panda. 😦

Don’t get me wrong; it’s okay to make money. My philosophy has been, though, that “the tools need to be free”. Go ahead and charge for a product, but if that product is a tool, and is fundamental for creating/learning something, you will help humanity by making it accessible to as many people as possible. This way, more people can spend their time learning and creating instead of missing out! 🙂

Well, that’s enough of my soapbox spiel. See you next time!