Fog Volumes arrive in Godot 4.0 | Hacker News Reader

Fog Volumes arrive in Godot 4.0

godotengine.org

244 pointsTomte44 comments

They almost get to this with some of their lighting demos -- the real joyous experience with this sort of lighting effect is to turn on a tiny bit of fog "dust" in some sort of big spacious building like a cathedral, and see the shafts of light coming in from various windows. Always a gorgeous effect to see in a video game.

This is something that brings in atmosphere into games. I love it.

Affectionately called "god rays" among graphics programmers

Also called "crepuscular rays" if you want even more keywords :D

Crepuscular rays are visible when you're facing away from the sun (hence their name, they generally exist when the sun is low). God rays are a fuzzier concept, but I've generally heard it when the rays appear to converge towards a light source (hence the divine term I guess). You could say both expressions do refer to the same rays, but with opposite perspectives.

Calling this feature "godot rays" was a missed opportunity I reckon.

I'm curious as to why they didn't bother with antialiasing on the demo images - the performance effect should be almost negligible for this scene on a modern machine. The render quality may be fine but the jaggies make the end product look less refined.

If Unity has another layoff round we might see Godot become more popular.

Unity still has an unparalleled ecosystem, but I'm fearful of locking myself to such an unstable company.

They laid off 4% of staff, doesn't seem that drastic to me. I know a few people working there and they didn't seem too fazed, but I get that it's a big company and other divisions might be different.

Doesn't take away from the fact that Godot is the shit.

Many were fazed. They were told no layoffs and two weeks later big layoffs.

> Doesn't take away from the fact that Godot is the shit.

Please would you mind elaborating on this? I am just curious.

> Please would you mind elaborating on this? I am just curious.

Godot is pretty easy to learn (their GDScript language is also well integrated), has decent performance, is pretty great for 2D, passable for 3D, has a low runtime footprint (the whole install is also <100 MB, unlike Unity which goes into multiple GB) and it being open source is an important factor for many people out there.

Plus, Unity had that whole fiasco of the editor slowing down immensely for larger projects in the last 3 or so versions, the whole deprecated networking thing, the unfinished DOTS development, the legacy/URP/HDRP split with assets that are breaking and lots of other things that make using it more difficult in this transition period - like the whole package management functionality having things randomly break sometimes due to missing packages, but no information to automatically install and enable them. Oh, and the input system change and the UI framework change are both for the better in the long time but are annoying in the short term.

Compared to that, it's understandable why people might go for Godot instead, which has neither the larger system requirements, not the closed source nature of the project and it hasn't been taken into random directions just to sell new features yet. Even the 4.0 branch is being worked on a lot until a time when it will finally be good enough. In the mean time, the 3.X branch also receives a lot of love: performance improvements, bug fixes and even lots of backported features. 4.0 not really supporting OpenGL (at least initially) will be cumbersome, but in the mean time you can just use 3.X instead which scales back all the way to super old mobile devices with OpenGL ES 2. The only thing that might make you want to hold off of Godot is its relative newness: things like terrain functionality is only available as an external plugin, for example, but on the whole it's in a pretty great and promising position, especially due to the Mono support!

That said, Unity still has the best platform support out there, is an excellent choice for most kinds of game development and even some software development (though Godot already feels better in that particular regard), has a large marketshare and lots of jobs for it, as well as has an amazing asset store that is helpful for rapid prototyping, getting pre-made functionality when you need it (billboards, advanced LOD solutions, advanced pathfinding, shaders etc.) though also gets used for asset flips a lot as well.

In short:

  - the Unity experience is a bit worse now than it was a few years ago
  - if they manage to sort everything out, Unity will be great in the long term
  - this means precisely nothing for Unity's market share, because it will still be widely used
  - Godot is a newcomer, but is essentially doing what jMonkeyEngine, Xenko/Stride, NeoAxis and other engines failed to do
  - there is a lot of community work put into it and somehow it still is pretty stable and has a gradually growing list of features
  - the deprecation policy isn't entirely clear yet for old versions, but there definitely are also a lot of backports
  - furthermore, Godot is just easy to use and there are already *some* plugins that one can use for their projects (e.g. terrain)
  - the whole open source nature of it really helps, though

Also, unless things have changed and I'm not aware of it, Godot doesn't have any licensing fees attached to it regardless of the size of your company.

Just on this point about ecosystem, what specifically are people thinking of?

The asset store and the q&a things are generally full of cruft. There are a lot of tutorial videos etc, but you generally don't need 50 on the same thing (...and Godot seems to have a pleasantly surprising number of decent tutorials floating around - both "official" and community created).

The only thing left I can think of is that it is easier to recruit engineers for unity, but surely pro shops are not using unity (on the whole)?

Okay, find something like Gaia Terrain for Godot ?

>, but surely pro shops are not using unity (on the whole)?

This is false, Unity is very popular, I've played several professional games made with it, for example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo:_The_World_Ends_with_You

> This is false, Unity is very popular, I've played several professional games made with it, for example.

This is true. Just look at statistics about which game engines were the most popular on Steam: https://steamdb.info/tech/

It's the most popular game engine out there by far.

Here's the top 10:

  Unity      29797
  Unreal     7665
  GameMaker  3173
  RPGMaker   2141
  RenPy      1392
  XNA        595
  Godot      504
  Adobe AIR  405
  Cocos2d    358
  MonoGame   293

V Rising, Hollow Knight, The Stanley Parable, Valheim, and more mainstream successes are all Unity games.

Note, Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, the recent remake, is a Unity game, the original HL2 mod and 2013 version are both in the source engine.

It's the game engine equivalent of "why people use Maya if there's Blender who can do that stuff". There is a lot of middleware designed to work with Unity, there are many workflows defined on how to properly export models from 3D software to Unity preserving all the materials and special effects. There isn't as much for Godot yet. Yes, you can do it yourself, but most companies don't have time for that.

Answering "why use maya instead of blender?" is more challenging to answer than it used to be.

Replace maya with zbrush / houdini and it's easier to answer but gets harder every update. I say this with a decade of unity experience but I hope godot follows blender's trajectory!

For me it will always be the UI. No matter how much they say they have improved it, it is still my least favorite of all the 3D Programs I have ever used and I have used many 3D programs.

If it's really a game engine equivalent of "why people use Maya if there's Blender who can do that stuff", it means Godot has a bright future ahead :)

Godot is nowwhere in the game industry whereas Unity is a standard.

I wonder how Godot's lack of official console support affects it's adoption.

I run a studio and as much as I want to consider Godot it’s off the table for exactly this reason (among a few others).

Games as a business are brutal, and not having a fast path to console releases is throwing potentially huge amounts of money away. Unity has its problems, but we had the first playable Switch and PS5 builds up and running in a matter of days.

Additionally, open source is great but it also means that for the most part everyone working on it is a volunteer. Partnering with Unity as an enterprise customer, I have a huge set of resources at my disposal to fix and address the 40000 things that can go wrong on 10 platforms and endless permutations of customer hardware. Godot just isn’t in the same league.

Godot is a great engine that will continue to grow and improve. Unity too is excellent, with many useful professional and tutorial assets. Unity's 3D offerings and tooling are more mature, even as an indie. Some of my favorite professional games made in Unity are: Dyson Sphere Program, Cities Skylines, Pillars of Eternity and Disco Elysium. These are all elite tier for their genres.

Regarding tooling, there's a lot of cruft sure, but that's just Sturgeon's law at play with Unity's size and age. Another aspect of Unity's reputation is it faces a fate similar to web development: it's a lot of people's first experience with programming.

The Godot experience is cleaner, more streamlined and constantly adding more great features. Godot is newer compare to Unreal and Unity so hasn't had time to accumulate cruft. But as long as developers aim for some amount of backwards compatibility, it will happen. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

> Unity still has an unparalleled ecosystem

You have never used Unreal Engine and it’s asset store etc.?

Unreal's asset store is cool, but I still find Unreal and it's C++ hard to use. I largely credit Unity with teaching me how to code.

I've learned tons from buying assets and working with them. C# is such a joy.

I fastly prefer coding to visual scripting.

Godot is a beautiful project. It's open, it's fun, it's a tiny package. To the devs who work on it, thank you. You make the world a better place.

I really want to play around with Godot for making unusual visualizations and computer interfaces, but so far it seems like there's quite a bit to ramp up to being able to execute an idea.

For visualisations it can be somewhat weird to use but as a game engine the ramp up is almost too fast in some cases as it tries to funnel you down easy concepts that don't scale

I decided to grunt it out via a course on Udemy and the ramp was worth it. The software is great!

Care to link the course please?

I'd be interested in this as well!

It looks wrong to me with soft shadows in the fog and then a sharp shadow on the floor below.

Nice. I remember when volumetric fog was a brand new thing in the original Unreal in 1998.

Is there a document or something that explains the 4.0 roadmap? These one off blog posts don't do a great job of showcasing future plans

Most likely they will add one once Godot 4 leaves alpha. The major focus for 4 was a rewrite of the graphics engine.

Agreed - from what I can see this is an enabler for adding new features later (e.g. 4.1 or whatever). There seem to be a few nice things though - e.g. temporal anti aliasing and this fog etc. Some features/fixes from 4 are being backported to 3.x, but I am not sure if there is any stringent rationale for what gets backported and what doesn't.

Looking forward to the v4 release! Good luck to all involved.

If I recall correctly, v4 is also supposed to have better baked-in multiplayer support. I'm also looking forward to the eventual release!

I like how something that used to be a trick for hiding draw distance limitations has become a rendering engine selling point, heh

I don't think the old fog effects used for drawing distance limitation tricks react to shadows, unlike volumetric fogs.

I think you are mixing up the classic fog that just depends on depth with volumetric fog which is a global effect that interacts with light.

Sort of reminds me of Crystal Space from 20 years ago, for some reason

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