The good, the bad, and the ugly
Patch 8 is delayed. Sorry about that. Here are the specifics about how that has come about, why it's delayed, and what's going on:
- Attempted to upgrade to Godot 4.6 with double precision:
This turned out to be a terrible idea with huge consequences. For one thing, it contains a glTF import bug that turned our models into potatoes, broke rigging, and destroyed animations.
As you can see from the picture, glTF in 4.6 isn't working with vertex coloring, the performance and customization technique used across nearly 100% of our models. We use vertex coloring to allow players to change the colors of models on the fly without having to load heavy texture maps, and we use it to render things in 1 pass that would take multiple passes if it were done via multiple material slots instead.
The rigging and animation changes between 4.4 and 4.6 were documented, and I spent from November until the end of January redoing models, rigs, and animation in prep for this. What I wasn't prepared for was that the glTF bug would also destroy the bones on non-FBX-based models. So I have to convert every single rigged model to FBX.
The good news - this was completed.
This is a big win, and took over a hundred hours of work between Blender, Mixamo, and Godot. I wrote an entirely new workflow for the process, though I'll have to lose hundreds of actor performances that were captured via glTF.
Godot 4.6 uses far more RAM than 4.5 for the exact same scene. That's with HiDPI support and SDFGI disabled. My 16GB of RAM wasn't sufficient for it with SDFGI and HiDPI enabled, it just jumped straight to swap and an FPS in the single digits. 4.5 with HiDPI and SDFGI enabled gets a solid 60FPS even on a mac mini.
Working with a very talented individual, we have an excellent looking new set of ship engine effects that are on par with what we had on UE4.
- Where do we go from here?
Well, as you're probably aware, spring 2025 saw the heat death of my 3060-based laptop, and it took me until January to find a replacement I could afford, in the shape of a refurbished mac mini. My only other dev machine is a 9 year old machine with an old radeon pro, and that put quite a crimp on my ability to work on the content for patch 8. Hard to tune handling or add animations when you average < 10 FPS!
The plan now is to backport the 4.6 changes into 4.5.2 and attempt to get these out in a Patch 8 along with the animation and handling improvements.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.longplay.games/alpha-1-patch-8-status