Book Image

Godot 4 Game Development Projects - Second Edition

By : Chris Bradfield
5 (1)
Book Image

Godot 4 Game Development Projects - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Chris Bradfield

Overview of this book

Godot 4.0 is one of the most sought-after open-source game engines, and if you’re enthusiastic about exploring its features, then this book is for you. Written by an author with over twenty-five years of experience, the Godot 4 Game Development Projects introduces the Godot game engine and its feature-rich 4.0 version. With an array of new capabilities, Godot 4.0 is a strong alternative to expensive commercial game engines. If you’re a beginner, this book will help you learn game development techniques, while experienced developers will understand how to use this powerful and customizable tool to bring their creative visions to life. This updated edition consists of five projects with an emphasis on the 3D capabilities of the engine that will help you build on your foundation-level skills through small-scale game projects. Along the way, you’ll gain insights into Godot’s inner workings and discover game development techniques that you can apply to your projects. Using a step-by-step approach and practical examples, this book covers everything from the absolute basics to sophisticated game physics, animations, and much more. By the time you complete the final project, you’ll have a strong foundation for future success with Godot 4.0 and you’ll be well on your way to developing a variety of games.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Introduction to shaders

A shader is a program that is designed to run on the GPU and alters the way that objects appear on the screen. Shaders are used extensively in both 2D and 3D development to create a variety of visual effects. They are called shaders because they were originally used for shading and lighting effects, but today they are used for a wide variety of visual effects. Because they run in the GPU in parallel, they are very fast but also come with some restrictions.

Learning more

This section is a very brief introduction to the concept of shaders. For a more in-depth understanding, see https://thebookofshaders.com/ and Godot’s shader documentation at .

Earlier in this book, when you added a StandardMaterial3D to a mesh, you were actually adding a shader – one that’s pre-configured and built into Godot. It’s great for many common situations, but sometimes you need something more specific, and for that, you’ll need to write shader...