We recently released Godot Engine 2.0 which had been 9 months in the making! It brings Godot Engine to a whole new usability level, making it ready to shine and be used by both professionals and hobbyists.
Probably interesting for our FreeGameDev community too, Godot Engine is now 100% a community-driven project (it used to be sponsored by a game development studio that the Godot creators had founded, but since Nov 2015 this is no longer the case and Godot is supported by the not-for-profit Software Freedom Conservancy). The community of co-developers has really grown a lot over the last year, especially since ~September 2015 when we started organizing a bug triage team, a documentation team, and opening up some push rights on the GitHub repo for trusted contributors.
What's new?
I'll just briefly list the main new changes here, but I encourage you to check our the release announcement directly, as it comes with pictures
New core features
- Improved scene instancing that keeps track of changes made to instances
- New scene inheritance mechanism, taking instancing even further
- New text-based scene format (tscn): human-readable INI-style format, much more git friendly than the previous XML-based text format.
New editor features
- Multiple scene editing: this is a HUGE boost in workflow, as previously you could only open one scene at a time.
- New layout and theme; more usable, and prettier!
- Advanced new file dialog, with file previews, favorites, etc.
- Improved code editor merged with the class reference panel
- Many new debugging features
- Live editing: code and test your game at the same time!
And so on and so on... the list is huge after 9 months of intensive development work by an ever growing community of contributors. It took so long mostly due to the new text-based scene format that implied to change quite a few core components and thus break the compatibility with previous versions (i.e. scenes made in Godot 2.0 can't be opened in 1.1). This is why the original plan to make a 1.2 release became a 2.0, and to make it "worth" the major number bump, the lead developers wanted it to be an outstanding release!
Downloading
Download the official binaries!
You can of course also build from source very easily, just clone the GitHub repository and use scons!
Godot Engine is now also featured on Steam, for free, with exactly the same features as in the git repo and the official binaries (so to the question "what's the point of being on Steam then?", the answer is that it greatly increases our visibility, and some people just like having their stuff on Steam to keep track of how many hours they waste on it
-- we'll probably add some Steam-specific features in the future, but it will never be a priority over improving the engine for everybody).New website
Some community members (most of them actually FreeGameDev users too, i.e. alket, Calinou and myself) have been working on a brand new website for Godot Engine, make it much more appealing to the masses, but also with some great new features like a Q&A platform and a sphinx-based documentation powered by ReadTheDocs. We are kindly hosted by TuxFamily, which seems to handle our boost in usage of the last few days quite fine
