Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

This is super interesting. The first video on the page sheds some light on how this actually works. It seems like they convert the scene into shapes that can be represented via SDF&#x27;s and smooth min (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iquilezles.org&#x2F;www&#x2F;articles&#x2F;smin&#x2F;smin.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iquilezles.org&#x2F;www&#x2F;articles&#x2F;smin&#x2F;smin.htm</a>) them to blend into an approximation of the actual scene. While also capturing some general texture color data to apply and blend into the shapes. I assume the shader ray marches the scene to compute the lighting reflections and bounces. I am curious how the probes&#x2F;nodes come into play and how they extract the light data from the shader output to apply it to the scene geometry (is it simply added in screen space?) I would be very interested in reading more detail on how this is actually implemented!

I get why Epic probably funds this, and I love to think how great Godot could be in another year or so (and how they could surpass Unity, etc). What I <i>don&#x27;t</i> really understand, though: Why wouldn&#x27;t Unity just implement this now, too?!<p>It&#x27;s open-source &amp; MIT-licensed; if it&#x27;s better than Unity&#x27;s GI -- and it <i>IS</i> better, because Unity does not currently have <i>ANY</i> realtime-GI solution in their latest versions (they stopped licensing Enlighten for current&#x2F;2020.x+ versions) -- so why wouldn&#x27;t Unity just implement this, too?<p>There&#x27;s nothing that appears to be stopping them from doing so, other than pride perhaps; part of me really, really hope that they&#x27;ll do exactly that, though I&#x27;ve yet to dive into the code to see how viable it may or may not be given Unity&#x27;s current SRP situation(s).

This looks really cool and impressive of course, but I still feel the easiest way for most indies (which Godot is aimed at) to stand out is to get away from photo-realism.

Illumination Tutorial for Software 3D Rendering (2&#x2F;2+) [c++20] (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eXU-6_jmw7Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eXU-6_jmw7Q</a>) was just released by Bisqwit and it goes over a rather naive implementation of real-time global illumination. The demo uses very basic geometry with a Minecraft look and shows the progress of paths being traced on the CPU. Compared to the Godot demo, the naive implementation is unworkably slow. Nevertheless, Bisqwit&#x27;s video explains the concepts and basic code implementation admirably.

Re-upping this blog post (sadly overlooked when first posted to HN) which asks the reasonable question &#x27;why not just use Godot for general-purpose applications?&#x27;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;swlh&#x2F;what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-applications-b1cfb941df3b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;swlh&#x2F;what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-ad...</a>

&gt; Tim Sweeney and Epic Games for their confidence in helping us finance our research via Epic Megagrant.<p>That’s interesting. Since this is all open source I guess Epic could potentially benefit from this... It’s nice to see they funded another engine.

Makes me realize that photo-realism is not the most important thing. Illumination(and by consequence shadows) is. Bad looking 3D games look bad because of two reasons: Aliasing (which is the worst thing in 3D imo, but easily solved) and most importantly, because of bad illumination code. If the lightning code is realistic, you don&#x27;t even need textures.

Is it possible to make a game that makes use of this new lighting system at high graphical settings and regresses to something simpler for low end computers?

So if I wanted to make a simple 2d game, should I go with godot, pygame, or a JavaScript game engine?

I like the old plugin model for its one click development cycle. The new plugin system forces to build the library which make the compile execute run cycle much longer

Now someone please ELI5 how this compares to the algorithm Unreal Engine employs?

Looks awesome! Might need to give godot a try :)