Godot has been upgraded with improvements including a new navigation server and physics interpolation in 3D.

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.

The new release has a fully overhauled navigation system that adds support for obstacle avoidance using the RVO2 library, and navigation meshes can now be baked at runtime. The  developers say the whole API is now a lot more flexible than it used to be. API compatibility has been maintained "within reason", but the team says underlying behavior will change, mainly to provide a lot more features and flexibility.

A new physics interpolation has been added to minimize jitter in 3D. Godot can render at frame rates independent from the fixed physics tick rate, which can lead to problems where the movement of objects does not line up with the rendered frames. The new interpolation can be enabled to automatically interpolate objects, smoothing out rendered frames. Fixed timestep interpolation is 3D only for now, but the team plans to add 2D support.

Other improvements include better tweening with SceneTreeTween,  and a new Time singleton that provides a better abstraction of the various ways of reading the current time from the operating system.

Godot also now provides a Label3D node out of the box. This is used to display text in 3D scenes, and developers can also use TextMesh to generate 3D meshes from font glyphs, so you can add WordArt to your scenes.

Godot 3.5 is available now.

More Information

Godot 3.5 download

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