Yesterday was a big day for all Godot Engine game developers working on 3d games using physics.
Since yesterday the Jolt Physics Engine was added as an alternative 3D Physics Engine to the source code of the coming Godot 4.4 version.
A little bit of background for that:
The stable version of Godot has it’s own 3d physics engine, which is used for all kinds of physics simulation in 3d games. These types of engines are really tricky to maintain, also to make their simulations performant and stable and also give you all the features your need.
(Image credit: Horizon Forbidden West by Guerrilla Games)
Many developers using Godot for 3D with heavy use of physics are working with an external open source physics engine with the name “Jolt”. This engine is written / maintained by Jorrit Rouwe and many other contributors and is battle-proofed, because it is used in “Horizon Forbidden West” by Guerrilla Games. It is suitable for games and VR applications.
The Jolt Physics Engine is a multi core friendly rigid body physics and collision detection library. Written in C++. Suitable for games and VR applications.
You can read more about this engine here:
https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics
Before yesterday devs wanting to use this engine had to use “Godot Jolt” an Godot extension that integrates the Jolt physics engine. This was a separate extension you had to install.
Now this code was integrated and re-written. Here the statement of Mikael Hermansson, the developer behind the extension:
This new module is a port of the Godot Jolt extension, developed by myself over the past two years, in large part as a personal project, but with the last year (including this port) being sponsored by W4 Games. I’ve also received a significant amount of assistance and contributions from @jrouwe during this development, which I’m very grateful for. In fact, several major features have been added to Jolt largely to cater to the needs of Godot.
Here the full thread of the merge into Godot 4.4:
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/99895
So, I’m looking forward to Godot’s future as a full fleshed and performant 3D Games Engine.
Have fun!
Helge
BTW, if you want to learn Godot from the ground up I offer some German classes in beginning of 2025: http://www.pixeltrain.net/events/
Also I’m planing a pixeltrain Godot Academy in English beginning next year.
If you are interested, please let me know.